Community Emergency Response TeamsOur local police and fire departments serve our communities well through the ups and down of normal life. When an earthquake, hurricane or other natural disaster strikes, the magnitude and geographic extent of the injuries and damage quickly overtax the professional services. If you are in distress during a disaster, damage to roads and bridges may prevent help from reaching you, even if it is available. Downed communications lines may prevent service providers from even knowing of your fate.Disasters often bring out the best in people as well. Neighbors turn out to help each other, regardless of personal cost or risk. This can be a mixed blessing. Following the Mexico City earthquake, spontaneous volunteers saved 800 people. However, 100 people lost their lives while attempting to save others. This is a high price to pay. Injury to volunteer disaster workers is preventable through proper training. To provide this training the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) concept was developed and implemented by the Los Angeles City Fire Department in 1985. CERT provides basic training in hazard mitigation, utility control, fire suppression, disaster medicine, light search and rescue, disaster psychology and the Incident Command System. The goal of the program is to help people not become victims themselves, and then to organize their neighborhoods to be self-sufficient in dealing with the emergency. Since its inception CERT has spread to many communities in a least 30 states, Canada and New Zealand. Fremont and Union City are two California communities that have enthusiastically embraced the CERT program. Located on San Francisco Bay, these communities are the northeast tip of Silicon Valley. They are ethnically diverse, with a mixture of single-family homes, apartments, commercial establishments and high-tech industry. As with any community, these cities present many challenges to the disaster planner. For starters, Fremont and Union City’s over 100 square miles and population of over a quarter of a million straddle the Hayward Fault – generally agreed by geologists to be the most likely origin of the next “big one”. In Fremont and Union City, initial CERT training is provided free to interested citizens by the local Fire Departments. The cities are subdivided into Districts, each with a District Coordinator to arrange on-going training for CERT members. More information on CERT is available from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Information on the CERT program in Fremont, California is available from the Fremont Fire Department. During CERT training the need for effective communications, both within neighborhoods and between neighborhoods and government officials, becomes readily apparent. If a neighborhood forms search and rescue teams, how do you keep in touch with them? How do the teams request help or report situations which are beyond their capability to handle? Once they get over the shock of learning that their cell phones may not work after disaster strikes, people start to look for other methods of communication. The result? The formation of the CERT Communications Team -- CERT Comm. |