It may be worth a call to your local fire department or city hall and ask about CERT. Communities are required to have an emergency response plan....ask to see it and ask how they have planned to deal with an overwhelming disaster that takes all their first responders into the field with many more members of the community without any support or hope of timely support.

Our CERT and RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service) teams flew to Florida and assisted with emergency operations this fall.

This is a photo of one of our members in the Red Cross Comm van and a photo of the van itself. Without CERT and RACES training these folks would not have been chosen to go to Florida to assist.





After we completed CERT we joined our community emergency services group to provide community communications to support first responders, CERT and VDAT (Visual Damage Assement Teams) in the event of an emergency.

CERT is just the beginning. It is and should be a springboard to facilitate many more community volunteer efforts. The training itself is only as valuable as you make it with additional work and efforts on your part. Some communities think that only the professionals should be involved in disaster work, but that, I believe is an incredibly myopic view. No community can possibly cope using only its first responders in the event of a large natural or manmade disaster.