Since I first posed the question about CERT, let me try to answer it myself now that I've been through the CERT course. Was it worth it? Depends on what you're looking for.

The lectures in the course are long and dull. The content is not rocket science, and almost all the information can be found in the manual, available from the Citizen Corps website. People who are good at learning on their own could get through this more efficiently than sitting through the lectures. So, if you just want information and don't need someone to read it to you in order to learn it, you don't need to take the CERT course.

Moreover, much of the course material is CERT-oriented. Its main guideline is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in disasters of mass casualties. So that means you won't even learn CPR, which is something that CERT is not supposed to do. They'd rather have you save five people in the same amount of time it may take to save one person with CPR, which can take a while. I also think some of the CERT operational parameters have to do with legal concerns. Deploying civilians in disasters probably gets some government lawyers very worried. So CERT wants to limit what its team members are allowed to do.

The hands-on exercises were more useful, especially for relatively inexperienced people. They were trivial for those with prior training (as EMT, SAR, etc.). Again, don't go to CERT just to learn techniques for opening airways or for bandaging wounds. There are far better courses for this sort of stuff, even though this was what attracted me to CERT in the first place (free training!). You'd get a lot more from a Red Cross course, and certainly a lot more hands-on experience.

CERT can vary quite a bit by location. Some people have reported getting free equipment (the CERT pack with about $120 worth of contents). I didn't, because my county ran out of backpacks, and the next round of funding hasn't arrived yet. (That means I'm not so useful if a disaster strikes -- I'm willing to volunteer, but I would like to be outfitted, rather than having to spend hundreds of dollars of my own money.) I got a print out of the manual with a nice binder, but that's not worth 20 hours of my life.

So did I regret going to CERT? No, at the end it was worth my while, though it could have been better.

I learned from my teammates. Some are into HAM radio and electronics. Others are experienced with long-term preparation. And some have search-and-rescue, firefighting, or military commanding experiences. It was highly instructive for me to see the more experienced people analyze the potential problems in an operation -- immensely more useful than the official CERT curriculum, which I regard as a mixture of common sense, basic aid, and legal/operational concerns. Those who had held commanding positions in the military really knew how to orchestrate complex operations in disasters. These guys would be very effective at running CERT.

The course concludes with a disaster simulation, and it was well-done. The instructors got permission to stage the simulation at the training building for the local firehouse. We had a good number of well-trained victims, in addition to an assortment of mannequins. I was impressed by the variety of situations they were able to work into a single hour. That includes: baby in a wreckage, people trapped in a house, person trapped under a collapsed wall in a narrow passageway, victims with various sorts of wounds (including ones hidden from sight), confused foreign tourists, etc. This took a lot of work to set up, so kudos to CERT!

My team had trouble coordinating and prioritizing. As a part of the simulation, we each arrived on scene separately, sometimes alone, sometimes with a buddy. Getting an assessment of the situation and figuring out what you need to do is not instinctive when the disaster looks big and there are people crying out for help. Coordinating without some sort of radio communication was also really hard, since we were dispersed over an area. This can get into the way of a team's work. Besides these crucial factors, the rest were mostly individual errors and inexperience.

It wasn't a stressful environment, I have to say, not that we would have been ready for real stress. The simulation felt like acting. A bit on the fake side. But obviously even this simulation was challenge enough for a new team. So it was a good learning experience that gave me a view of what it's like to be a responder in a disaster.

I appreciate most of all the opportunity to get involved in the community's emergency management. At the end, this is probably what you should CERT for -- to be a part of the effort that might save your neighborhood/city/state. In my view, CERT is still a developing program. Right now they're training people and forming individual teams, but it looks like they still face the challenge of coordinating all these civilians who, might I add, have many other life priorities, keeping the teams together, motivated, up-to-date and competent in their training.

What kind of continuing training/education does your CERT team have?