Following the Loma Prieta earthquake and prior to the commencement of any community response training in the City, we did some research and found that the City Charter stated "the Fire Department is responsible for preparing the citizens of San Francisco for a disaster". It only seemed logical that the fire department would be responsible for conducting and managing a community emergency response training, but was it so logical?

Today, I am not so sure that fire departments are the best organization to manage CERT trainings and CERT organizations. When the training first started, program managers, myself included, were unsure of how CERT teams would work and how they could be effective in anything but a devastating disaster, where they would be working on their own. Even the FEMA CERT materials, that came out in the mid 90s, showed a convoluted CERT management structure that looked little like the Incident Command System used by professional organizations and offered limited guidance on connecting CERT teams to the local community response system. There were no examples of CERT teams working in real disasters at that point, no models, no guidelines, but all this was to come.

In the last 16 years since the CERT training first started in Los Angeles, thousands of CERT teams have been formed across the Country and around the world. Many of these teams have responded to disasters, large and small, in their community. No longer do we have to wonder how these teams can be used. We now know that CERT teams have assisted, augmented and even replaced many different functions on our emergency management and response flow charts during times of need. We now know that their scope of activity can be much, much broader than what was originally envisioned in California many years ago.
    

With the recent revisions of the FEMA CERT materials, many lessons learned over the last 10 years have been incorporated. The CERT management structure now fits the Incident Command System model that is used by professional responders and emergency managers in our communities. There is also information on linking the teams to the local emergency management system. Both critical issues and both interlinking issues. 

We have seen that for CERT teams to be successful in their ever expanding role, the teams must understand the emergency management and response structure and system in their community. The best way to do this is to use the same structure and system for the management and operations of the CERT teams. Most communities that have been conducting the training for awhile have already done this. CERTs should be included on community emergency management organizational charts so that there are clear lines of responsibility, communication and accountability. CERTs should be incorporated into community emergency plans as an asset that can be used in many different ways depending on the event and need.

It may have appeared logical to us back in 1989 to have our teams under the control of the fire department. But much has changed since then. The concept of the CERT team is constantly evolving as teams are used in various capacities following a disaster that were never envisioned when the training was in its fledgling years. The fire departments focus on response to and mitigation of disaster events, but CERT teams have been used for much more than this in real disasters. It would appear to make sense to move the control of CERT teams from the fire departments to the local emergency management office where they can be used to "do the greatest good for the greatest number of people", be that in a response role as envisioned years ago, or in some support role that is needed by the community, as the team have been used in the last few years. 

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