Emporia State students had to opportunity to talk with the Emporia Police Department, Lyon County Sheriff’s Office, Emporia Fire Department, Kansas Department of Agriculture and ESU Police and Safety from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. yesterday in Memorial Union and on the East side of Wooster Lake.

“What it (Safety Day) is more or less is just to stress safety in all aspects to the students,” said Ben Lienemann, lieutenant at the fire department. “I know quite a few years ago we had an event happen where we had some students die at a house outside of campus and it was from a fire, so we want fire safety to be big.”

Fire safety was not the only thing stressed.

Steve Samuelson, CFM NFIP specialist for the Kansas Department of Agriculture, had a flood demonstration where students picked a bridge to build. The demonstration was then flooded to show how each bridge would flood an area during different types of rainfall.

Haydar Al-Ameen, graduate library information science major, stopped at all three booths and said that the flood demonstration was the most interesting, and that he had not seen anything like that since he began going to school at ESU in 2009. 

Linsey Albee, sophomore Spanish major, also enjoyed the demonstration.

“It looked kind of cool because they were not there to talk,” Albee said. “They had something to show you.”

Jason Crumb, detention officer for the Lyon County Sheriff’s office, said he wanted to emphasize more than safety at the event.

“I believe it is to get the word out as to what our different law enforcement agencies do to try to keep our city and our community a safer place,” Crumb said. “We are people like anyone else. We’re more than willing to be face to face with people. We’re part of the community as well.”