Public Safety Interns Enhance Visitor Experience

The Division of Risk Management has collaborated with the Student Conservation Association  to launch a first-ever public risk management student internship program. 

The students’ summer experience began officially on June 15th with a six-day training session held at Mount Rainier National Park.  The program has fielded 15 interns, ranging from undergraduate to doctoral level students.  Students come from universities such as Cornell, Virginia Tech, Columbia, the University of South Florida, and Keene State College in New Hampshire, among others. 

The week-long training at Mount Rainier was designed to prepare interns for 12 to 20 weeks in the field in which they would  undertake projects to prevent visitor and employee injuries.  Training topics included an orientation to the National Park Service, injury epidemiology, risk assessment, cultural competency /communication and interpretation, and operational ;eadership.  In addition, interns received 16 hours of wilderness first aid training and adult and infant CPR instruction and received certifications.

Interns are currently serving at 14 parks Servicewide, undertaking a variety of injury prevention projects.  Just a few examples include: 

• a project in Cuyahoga Valley National Park to analyze and identify causes of visitor injuries on the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath;
• a project at Death Valley National Park to design and set up a data collection system for the park so they can analyze patterns of injury;
• a review of injury data at Delaware Water Gap to identify and evaluate mitigation strategies to prevent future drowning;
• an evaluation at Gateway National Recreation Area of the surf lifeguard training program;
• a project at Yosemite National Park making contact with hundreds of visitors to educate them about how to better prepare for risks associated with their activities at the park;
• a project at Olympic National Park to analyze search and rescue data to yield lessons learned for prevention and future staff training; and
• a project in WASO to design a safety related Web Ranger module.

These are only a few of the exciting projects interns are undertaking this summer as part of this program. 

The goals of this program are to:

• Build a cadre of future leaders and park staff who apply and further develop skills/understanding of wilderness risk management techniques.
• Increase capacity of current park staff to undertake risk management and injury prevention initiatives.
• Provide resources to strengthen parks’ risk management programs.
• Provide safety outreach and education to park visitors.