Winter 1998 Volume 1 Number 1
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CERTs…Bigger Than Disaster Response! Rachel Jacky, Community Emergency Services Manager....Portland, Oregon Fire Bureau All around the United States, fire departments, emergency management professionals and some law enforcement agencies are getting on board with community emergency response team training. We have CERTs, NERTs |
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| (Neighborhood Emergency Response
Teams), NETs (Neighborhood Emergency Teams), BETs (Business Emergency Teams), and the list
of acronyms continues to grow. All of our programs have a lot in common—primarily the
belief that the community’s ability to respond immediately after a disaster is
essential for effective emergency management. Our various programs also use the same basic
curriculum to train civilian response teams and rely on community-minded volunteers who
make the time to get trained and organize teams. And we also share the sometimes
overwhelming need for ways to keep those volunteers engaged in the program. This need for
volunteer maintenance can be turned into an asset of sorts, particularly when CERTs are
regarded as a critical resource for disaster response and more! In Portland, the Fire Bureau has been training Neighborhood Emergency Teams (NETs) and Business Emergency Teams for four years. Nearly 650 citizens in our city of 500,000 have joined together to organize 85 NETs. We’re only about a third of the way to our goal of a Team of 20 people in each of the city’s 95 neighborhoods. Even so, the Fire Bureau has already activated the NETs twice—during a major winter storm in 1995 and the federally declared flood in the spring of 1996. A number of the NETs also self-activated during an ice storm in the winter of 1996. |
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Even given Team activation during these regional emergencies,
let’s face it—it’s a long time between disasters (especially waiting for
the big earthquake that’s due any time in the Pacific Northwest). Of course we
wouldn’t want these events to occur more frequently, but how do you keep the Teams
active and engaged when nothing’s going on? Newsletters, advanced training, drills, and exercises seem to help in keeping volunteers engaged in many CERT programs around the country. |
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| We’ve also started looking beyond disaster response at a
wider range of Team activities. Here’s a sampler from Portland: NET Smoke Detector Squad: The Fire Bureau’s Public Education Office provides additional training for NET members on how to install smoke detectors and answer basic fire and life safety questions. When a homeowner calls the "Smoke Detector Hotline" in PEO, the call is referred to the NET volunteers in that area who install the detector within seven days. Medical standby at community events: At neighborhood fairs and parades, NET members staff the first aid booth. At the Rose Festival parade (a major event which attracts thousands of people), six units of NET members work with two paramedic squads to provide medical coverage along the entire parade route. Disaster Preparedness Speakers Bureau: Team members attend PTA, neighborhood association, and service club meetings in their own areas to present information on household preparedness and NET/BET training. The Fire Bureau provides flyers, maps, and display boards. "Victims" in exercises for Fire Bureau personnel: Given their training and the exercises they’ve been through, NET members know how to act as victims. It’s simple to recruit them for an MCI exercise, for example, and their performance makes it a better exercise for the firefighters. |
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Community safety fairs: Fire station personnel are frequently asked to attend community safety fairs. They often enlist the help of local NET members to coordinate with the neighborhood groups and to provide coverage at the Fire Bureau display if the company has an emergency run during the event. This connection and familiarity between the NETs and the crew at their local fire station can contribute to smoother operations during disaster response, too. NET Exercise Swaps: It seems that the NETs are always interested in refreshing their skills with an exercise, and exercises staged in the Teams’ own neighborhoods are ideal. Such exercises are also very time-consuming. "Swaps" allow us to stage |
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| more of these events by pairing up two Teams who design,
conduct and evaluate neighborhood exercises for each other. The Teams seem to get almost
as much out of designing and conducting an exercise as they get from going through an
exercise. All of these projects and activities help keep the volunteers on board. They strengthen individual commitment and team cohesion. But it’s worth noting that these expanded Team functions provide a number of other significant benefits:
We were happy to join EMI and CERT programs around the country in thinking "outside the box" about training citizens for disaster response. Now we’re trying to think creatively about how to sustain what we’ve started. If you’ve got any thoughts, please pass them along to The Connection. We can all use more good ideas! |
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