Wayne County Community College District

Down River Emergency Training Complex (DRET)

Mary M. Smith

Anthony T. Arminiak

Voice Over: In response to the growing needs and concerns for specialized public safety training and technical education for industry and emergency response services, the Wayne County Community College District is creating a ten-acre emergency training complex. This complex will provide emergency response education and training services throughout the surrounding communities at a state and at a national level.

Smith – DRET is a specialized, state of the art training center that is very unique in that it will offer training opportunities to all community members as well as specialized groups.

Arminiak – The Down River Emergency Training Complex, or as we call it DRET, came about approximately three years ago when we formed a committee of firefighter, personnel, law enforcement, EMS, and industrial individuals to explore an option to create a training center for specialized training. That is how this project began.

Smith – There has been a great deal of excitement from our community members in response to having this center constructed. They have come out to all of our town meetings, they have written letters of support, and they have been a part of writing the proposal process.

Arminiak - We have had various venders also participate in this. We have had C & L railroad participate in this. We have had Detroit Edison participate in this particular venture. All the local fire departments have been on board right from the beginning of this project. So we have had tremendous support for this program. The nice thing about this particular project is that it allows all the disciplines to work together as a unit, so we will also be doing a lot of incident command structure with this. So it provides a great opportunity for homeland security because one of the focuses with homeland security is that all the agencies train together, and this particular ten-acre facility will address that in a very unique way. The complex is very unique because all these simulators are going to be located in one location. There is nowhere else in the United States that will have all these simulators in one location. That is what is very unique about this particular center.

The district envisions that this particular center will be a model for future training centers throughout the United States.

Smith – This is just one example of how Wayne County Community College District chooses to stay on the cutting edge. We invite you to come back at the end of the year when the project is completed.

For more information,

please contact

Dr. Mary M. Smith at

313-496-2587