I looked over the training requirements for CERT several years ago.

If I remember correctly, about 40 hours of training including basic first aid, fire extinguishers, and basic cribbing. A good start for someone new to public assistance.

It is certainly more training and awareness than the average person on the street but significantly less than the average public safety member. Like any area, those who know more, tend to discount those who don't have the same level of training. If it even shows up in the fire department between the volunteers and the paid staff. Often they have the same amounts of training from the same instructors but the paid discount the volunteer simply because they are not paid.

The concerns I have regarding CERT are the ongoing training and their availability. Like all training, the axiom Use it or Lose it certainly holds true for rescue as well. I applaud those who make the effort to form a CERT team and take the initial training. I just hope that they continue to train to keep the information in the fore front and practice those skills to ensure they are second nature. The second issue is of their availability and deployment times. Do the teams carry pagers or other communications alert systems and how long does it take them from notification to deployment. Do they have rotation schedules so they could place a subset of the team on a scene for 24+ hours?

I have participated in several county wide mock disasters and the biggest issue is communications. Each department is on a different radio channel and they do not have the ability to communicate outside of their own department. The department on a particular scene does the best it can given its training and equipment but often needs the services of an additional team that could resolve the problem quicker if only they could be brought to bear at that scene. Sometimes that team is available but there is no way to contact them. I am not sure what kinds of communications capability CERT teams have, both with themselves and the ability to communicate with other departments or teams.

I have also participated in multi-agency responses in county wide disasters due to flooding and hurricanes. Without power, water, and food, we had to be self-sufficient by bringing all our own. We set up tents, slept in sleeping bags, and provided our own food and water. From what I saw of the CERT training, they were not equipped for that level of response.

My question is how to best use the CERT teams. Maybe at a Mass Casualty Incident, they could perform triage but they don't have the skills to really treat extreme patients. I am not sure if they have the BLS skills to perform a through patient assessment to effectively triage patients. While movies always show lines of people trampling through the woods on searches, that is not the most common kind of search and I am not sure how CERT teams could be utilized without additional training in search.

Maybe the lack of CERT teams is due to an educational issue. The issue may be that Public Safety has not been trained on how to best use CERT teams. Public safety looks at what training CERT teams have and find that they would not trust them on a scene since their training level is so low compared to what Public Safety would expect someone to do. I am not against CERT teams, I am just not sure how to include them. Can anyone help me better understand CERT teams role?