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	THE LIFE OF THE PROGRAM Bruce Wilson, City of Simi Valley Emergency Services, California As with any organization, church, PTA, scouts, anything, there is a cadre of 20 percent of the members who do 80 percent of the work. The same is true with CERT, as far as I'm able to see. I inherited the CERT program here in Simi Valley, California, in 1999. There was a database chock-full of names of those who had been trained since the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The protocol was for me to graduate two CERT classes per year, which would be trained by the Ventura County Fire Department. I was also tasked with organizing two refresher classes per year, also taught by Ventura County Fire, so that those already trained would be re-trained at least once a year.
After about a year it became clear that, for a number of reasons, the protocol would not work. First, there was a response problem. When we advertised for refresher training there was only an 11 percent response from a database that had more than 400 members. That same 11 percent held true for stand-by lists for potential call-outs and actual call-outs themselves…11 percent, a consistent and annoying 11 percent. Second, even if the response was much higher, as it should have been, the fire department could only handle two classes of twenty-five, each year. If the classes were bigger (which they never were) we would have to turn people away, and if more than fifty people per year wanted refresher training they could not be accommodated. Major change was necessary. Answer number one was to go through and clean out the database. Much of the information was outright incorrect, many people declared themselves too old or to infirm for service, many had moved away, divorced, etc. and were no longer available to serve. One third of the database was purged. Of those left in the database that same 11 percent made themselves available for training. That number keeps popping up like a bad penny.
It became evident that most people did not want to be bothered with on-going disaster service work…they had other priorities. Once trained and able to take care of their own families, most lost interest. The City Council was approached with a plan to re-energize the CERT program, the gist of which was to reclassify those who no longer wanted to be bothered with on-going training and service demands. Letters were sent to all stating that those who wanted to remain as a response resource had to opt-in to a new Disaster Service Worker program; those who did not would be re-classified as Disaster Trained Citizens and de-activated.
Forty-four members opted in to the DSW training program, despite the strident demands placed on them: "If you sign on you must train once a month, participate in an exercise every quarter, and when called for service, report without delay. You must submit to a background investigation. You cannot miss class, you cannot be late for class. Block the time out and show up, no excuses." All but seven stayed on. My promise to them was to provide management-level training to reward their commitment. The goal was to produce a mobile field force of sorts that can appear at a command post and be an asset rather than something that HAS to be dealt with and incorporated into the incident for public relations reasons. It is working.
	EMT training is in the works, as is disaster mortuary, mass casualty, mass fatality, train accident, haz-mat, traffic control, shelter management and any other emergency management discipline I can find for them. They are eating it up. They feel special, privilege to be respected members of the DSW program and the emergency management community. They acquitted themselves very well in the recent Simi Valley Fire incident.
I want the best trained and equipped emergency response group in the country. When they show up at an incident I want them to be a trusted resource for the incident commander. I want to be able to say: "I have fifteen qualified EMTs, twelve traffic controllers, twenty mass-casualty specialists, fourteen disaster mortuary specialists, stretcher teams, cribbers, haz-mat experts", whatever. The incident commander can then just give me orders to fill and we will become a sought-after resource. It's already happening. The emergency management professionals are positively gushy about our response to the recent wildland fires. The program is new; it is not being done anywhere else. I know this because I am making it up as I go along. As it progresses I will elaborate with future articles as they become appropriate.

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