No program in my area either. I guess living on a fault line between two likely volcanos isn't good enough. <img src="/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />

Sue

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.

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?

While the term "Public Safety Member" covers a lot of ground...

I won't be able to operate on a CERT team in real life - my professional duties will take precedence. If there are functional CERT teams available to me, I expect I'll use them if they can be of assistance in a relatively large scale or wide spread incident.

From a professional standpoint, finding out first hand what training CERT gives and how they see them selves is part of why I'm participating in the training right now. I have other reasons, two of which are:

1) Scouts. I want to determine if this is useful for older Scouts on a number of levels.

2) I fight the "somebody else take care of my problems for me" attitude every day - I don't just gripe about it, I do something about it. If CERT looks useful at helping combat that attitude, I have a very good chance of influencing the right local agencies to promote CERT training for groups of average already-organized citizens.

Whether it's an attitude adjustment operation or the development of a practical supplement to other "professional" public safety resources remains to be seen. (or both)

Apparently we're not the only ones wondering these things. The local session before this one had a number of "public safety members" attend for reasons reportedly similar to mine. There are a couple of Paramedics in this class, although I'm not clear as to why just yet.

I have no comment on the training so far, but the concepts of use/utility/capabilities being taught etc. is not what I expected. There's some serious humility coming from the front of the room - all "public safety members" teaching, BTW. I don't believe this is going to turn out a corps of Walter Mitty type folks. Actually, I'm kinda irritated right now that there are not more folks involved, even if merely out of curiosity...

The "technical" stuff has been very boring to me - nothing new to me so far, and I'm paying REAL close attention. I am learning a heck of a lot about CERT, which is my real objective. OTOH, my very capable wife is learning a lot of new and useful stuff, as are many other folks in the audience with us.

But I really have not formed any overall opinions of CERT institutionally yet.

We have the similar CERT training over here (adopted from US). I had the chance to study on the original material. All I can say is, it is much better than no training but it is never enough isn't it?

My focus is generally on earthquakes. As there is no way to prevent an earthquake all you can do is to be prepared when you have to face it. Each individual should be made aware of the risk that will come across one day and should be reminded it is the responsibility of everyone to take action in emergency preparedness. The Government authorities should not ignore the role of NGOs in civil defence and support them to run their emergency preparedness programmes in order to improve the preparedness level of the public. There is no way to save lives with only forming SAR teams in big numbers or with high technology SAR equipment. More resources should be transferred to Public Awareness Programmes without any hesitation. In big events or even in local ones 85% of the casualties are rescued by individuals. 15% is left to the teams. The more the man on the street knows or is able, the better it is.

Lets take Istanbul as an example: With a population over 12 million citizens and a recorded building stock of 1.200.000, the city is only 10 miles from the faultline which lays on the bottom of the Marmara Sea. The results of the research on the faultlines tell us how bad the impact will be. There are different theories about the expected earthquake but most experts agree that the time span is between 2 to 30 years and a magnitude not less than 7 on the Richter Scale can be expected.

City Authorities estimate a loss of 15% of the buildings within Istanbul. This may seem like a large number for a such a city but the illegal, uncontrolled construction process which took place for many years makes even this number optimistic. This also means that roughly over a million citizens of Istanbul will be left to face the hazards of collapsing/collapsed buildings alone. At the present time there is no national or international response that can handle such a catastrophic situation. Disaster Management Centres formed by the Municipalities and the State seem to work on the paper but the reality is far less certain. Analysis of recently made statements by officials proves that they will spend the first 72 hours reorganizing their own institutions. This means that members of the effected community will be left almost un-assisted for the first 3-4 days after a major disaster. Supported only with the help of a limited number of independent rescue personel, survivors will have to help themselves.


A small quote from the last paragraph of an article about fire first aid.

The acquisition of emergency professionality by ordinary people is a sign of civil and cultural progress. Thus the man in the street - the potential first rescue worker - must not only be able to receive specific training for emergency situations but, more importantly, be aware that he is in a state of preparedness to offer his aid methodically and effectively.

You can find the original at here

In almost every disaster or incident I operated I had always worked with locals and individuals. I wish they were a little bit trained.

Burak

I look at CERTs as a “force multiplier”, as ratstr noted in his post, no technical/fire/rescue team will have the necessary resources to be fully self sufficient in a major event. Depending upon the incident, I can envision having 1 CERT under the direction of 1-2 technical/fire/rescue team members, acting as a “strike team”.

Technical rescues are often labor and time intensive operations, having a ready pool of individuals who have an awareness and some training of potential hazards and hazard mitigation that can be assigned important, but time consuming duties (hasty search, crowd control, care of the walking wounded, physical laborers, etc.) is vital. This would free up trained fire/rescue personal to deal with the more technical or possibly hazardous rescues.

I do think it is important to now, before a major event occurs, have the appropriate Public Safety/Emergency Management officials determine how to use CERTs effectively and to introduce the concept to fire/rescue responders, so tuff wars can hopefully be avoided. Having the CERTs actually train on occasion with fire/rescue personal will go along way in fostering the understanding of how CERTs can be utilized.

I have used the CERT training materials with great success in Ecuador for Fire Departments, Civil Defense and Red Cross units. Emergency response training material in Spanish is hard to come by, the CERT material is perfect for these groups as they are often located in small towns and villages, where there are no formal or trained personal.

Pete

I agree that CERT is certainly minimal training overall, but probably its most important aspect is that the graduates have some awareness of taking care of themselves, family and neighbors when presented with overwhelming local problems. Simply having a mindset that local first responders may not get to you or your neighborhood in a large scale disaster, knowing a few steps to take to assist your very local community in those days has got to be one of the best aspects of CERT. So many people think their community will handle everything....this just will not be, so CERT at a minimum opens peoples eyes to the limited resouces and gives some basic information and training that can be useful.

CERT deployment, use etc is all dependent on the local understanding and preplanning for disaster mitigation. Our community CERT program is very recent (2years) and we do not have enough members, but the community has tried to incorporate the teams into the plans and I think will benefit from doing so.

If the first responders can make use of the teams that would be great, but in our community I think the CERT teams may end up being the first responders in their neighborhoods. They can and will organize their friends and neighbors to work very locally and therefore not burden the professional teams with the more minor responsibilities. We have communication capabilities to the firehouse and city hall, we have damage assesment teams who can locate, secure and report problems, and we have the very basic training that comes from CERT to take on some tasks independent of the first responders. Evacuation of unsafe buildings, shelter management, small fires, gas meter leaks, water leaks etc are all within the scope of our CERT groups.

The fact that we have stressed communication from field to the emergency operations center is a huge aspect IMO.

Our training strongly stressed evaluation of the incident and awareness of our role prior to any action. Our safety above all else so as not to magnify the problem.

The training is very minimal, the diversity of topics is so broad, that no one should graduate from the class with even a remote though of being a fully-trained emergency worker. However we should know what roles are possible, and know that in certain disasters how our efforts can assist the community.

Our CERT groups also stress additional training strongly.

I think that any public safety administration that has not considered the use of volunteers in a disaster is foolish. People will turn out to help....it will be far better if at least a portion of those who turn out have some background and can at least serve to organize the volunteers.

Yesterday on I-5 North of Seattle there was a multi-car accident. Two cars were on fire and one car with trapped live occupants was jammed into one of the flaming cars. A quick thinking truck driver hooked this car to a tow rope and dragged it away from the flames. His actions saved the trapped occupants. If the crowd would have waited for first responders far more than one would have died. Several people assisted in this accident.

As a side note: the emergency service group that I belong to had a dinner last night. 24 "Presidents Volunteer Service Awards" were presented. These ranged from those who had contributed 100+ up to 4000+ hours of public service. This group consists of both CERT and RACES teams. Having an active group that trains, learns, and develops is really the backbone of volunteer efforts like CERT.

I encourage people to contact their civic leaders and ask about the community emergency plans. I think it is far better to be an active participant than a passive victim.

"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."

This was one of the major problems on 9-11. It's been a problem for a long time, but nothing has changed. Bureaucratic ego gets in the way of most good ideas, & that has simply got to stop. And it's going to have to be people like us to force them, because they simply are too egotistical to do it themselves.

"I look at CERTs as a “force multiplier” as ... no technical/fire/rescue team will have the necessary resources to be fully self sufficient in a major event." & "Analysis of recently made statements by officials proves that they will spend the first 72 hours reorganizing their own institutions... [leaving] members of the effected community... almost un-assisted for the first 3-4 days after a major disaster." & "In big events or even in local ones 85% of the casualties are rescued by individuals. 15% is left to the teams. The more the man on the street knows or is able, the better it is."

All three of these comments indicate the value of having the highest number of people with even the most rudimentary of training. I would venture to guess that a lot of people would die in those 72 hours while the bureaucatic wheels are slowly revving up, people who wouldn't die if someone near them knew something. Even hypothermia kills, but it's something that is easily prevented or treated.

The three major prospective disasters in my area are flooding, earthquake & volcano eruption. Any of these would preclude getting anywhere fast, as even just volcano ash clogs auto air filters so badly that one needs to stop every two miles and clean it out. And those same problems will prevent anyone coming IN to help, except possibly by air.... eventually.

So, it's going to be the local neighborhood residents as first responders, no question. And if there are say, six people in the neighborhood with CERT training, at least they can TELL other people what needs to be done on a rudimentary basis. Even at the WTC, a lot of people didn't leave until they were told to, and since the 911 dispatchers were left totally in the dark about what was going on, many of them gave the advice to stay. It was frequently INDIVIDUALS who told the indecisive to get out.

Like it or not, people are just going to have to start depending on themselves, instead of leaving their lives in the hands of bureaucrats who were voted into office due to their good looks.

Sue

I too found that this aspect of CERT may have been the most valuable part of the training to me personally. Getting my wife involved, thinking, preparing and equipping was really not possible prior to the CERT classes. Talking about an emergency contact number, buying a few supplies for home, prep of a 72 hours kit, and HAM radio were all subjects that came up and we acted on after CERT classes.

This has to be the best thing that came from the training.

We have a family plan in place that never would have happened without CERT.

Hi, Burak!

Nice to see a post from you. I think your comments are spot-on target.

I have a little digging to do into CERT in my area - it is new (we were issued local CERT kits number "13" and "14" today to take home). As of this evening, I feel compelled to say that I was VERY impressed with the performances in the exercises today. No egos in the way at all, great synergy on the various teams, and they (OK - we) were very impressive in accomplishing the tasks. I had to fight to be a peon, and it was especially revealing and rewarding to see folks adapt and get on with it when I refused to take any lead roles. There was plenty of useful feedback and free self-criticism, but I honestly found NOTHING to be critical of. These regular citizens did a commendable job, no reservations. Hope they continue to be involved.

Pete, Randy, and Susan's thoughts also are similar to mine. More in a few (or several) days after I hear from others attending the next training session and get a few more questions of my own (about the local efforts) answered.

Best Regards,

Tom