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		Hurricane Help! Charlie Johnson, Fire Chief, Cape Coral Florida Cape Coral, Florida...September 23, 1998 As Hurricane George was making it's killer path through the Caribbean, the City of Cape Coral was preparing for what forecasters had predicted would be the worst hurricane to hit South West Florida since Hurricane Donna in 1962.
	Fire Chief/Emergency Management Director Charlie Johnson along with City Manager Steve Daugnault opened the emergency operations center with a practical staff as the city began to implement it's newly revised Emergency Management Plan. One of the issues facing the city was an overload of the 911 Public Safety Dispatch Center with calls for general information. Although the Lee County (FL) already had a fully staffed and functioning hotline, calls to 911 began to swell. Quick action on the part of the City Manager and Fire Chief to overcome this issue by setting up the city's own "emergency information hotline". As the city phone technical worked to establish the emergency telephone bank and the City's PIO worked with the county Emergency Operations Center to coordinate information, the Fire Chief and his staff looked for ways to staff the newly established hotline. During 1997 and 1998 the City of Cape Coral Fire/Rescue and Emergency Management Services had trained approximately 85 citizens in a program called Citizens Emergency Response Teams (CERT). These teams were trained to organize their neighborhoods and take limited emergency response action in the aftermath of a natural or manmade disaster. The program was new to the community, as it only been established in October of 1997. This meant the program managers and the citizen members had no opportunity to exercise the CERT teams on a large scale. process. Knowing the program, seeing the students perform their role during small mock disasters at the end of each class, Chief Johnson knew these citizens had the potential to handle this task and did not hesitate to put out the call for Citizen Emergency Response
		Team volunteers to staff the "EMERGENCY INFORMATION HOTLINE" for Cape Coral. With CERT members staffing the phones along with their Fire/Rescue CERT instructors serving as team leaders, one thousand six hundred fifty calls for service were satisfactorily handled over a 36 hour period. The volunteers worked shifts around the clock to make the hotline a success.
	The City of Cape Coral and South West Florida was spared the full wrath the Hurricane George delivered further north. Still, knowing the potential of such a storm the City was well prepared and the proactive approach that had been taken by the City leaders paid off. Likewise the Citizen Emergency Response Teams were prepared, ready and willing to lend a hand. Their actions displayed in response to this emergency has given the program the credibility within the community that it deserves and the city leaders have taken notice of these constituents by preparing personalized thank you letters from the Mayor, City Manager and Fire Chief. The CERT program fits any community and works through most any disaster. The most important thing the training provides is confidence in one's self that they can "survive" a disaster and help others do the same.

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