CERT LVH Our First

CERT @ LVH .. Our First Drill

Our CERT Team (Community Emergency Response Team) will be having its very first drill here at LVH. The time and date are not solid yet but it will be soon. We have about a ka-zillion new procedures we want to try out to see if they will work for our community. Working in this manner we will be able to establish a disaster plan that will serve our community for years to come.

All of our team members started training last October. There are about 9 members in the LVH group. At any one time, because folks are gone from the Hill, for one reason or another, you can expect 3 to 6 members of the team to be available in an emergency. This clearly is not enough to cover our entire community. So we are going to make use of all the volunteer help we can muster.

The way we are going to do that is use volunteers from our community to augment our trained people. Where we would normally need 3 or 4 CERT team members we will use 1 CERT team member as a group leader trained in emergency response techniques to head a team of 3 or 4 LVH community volunteers. In this manner we hope to multiply our effectiveness.  Where we need information and communications we are again going to use other volunteers under the supervision of CERT trained people.

If our emergency entailed helping people medically we might have volunteers hold a pressure point on an injured person. We might have volunteers help remove the injured to a safe area under the direction of a CERT team member. Meanwhile the CERT team will move on to help more people. In this manner we hope to do the most good for the most people in the shortest amount of time.

We are definitely going to ask for volunteers to help us canvass the entire neighborhood immediately during our simulated emergency. These volunteers will work a new system we are trying out for the first time. Our thinking goes that this would be a natural fit for our already established Neighborhood Watch Block Captains and their assistants. Were these folks able to turn out we could get the information we need to operate as a CERT team in just a few minutes. There probably is nothing faster than people who are already familiar with their neighborhoods for canvassing.  Fast is critical. We need your help.

We already have 2 volunteer ladies who used to be California Highway Patrol Dispatchers that will be working our communications section. We have 3 volunteers signed up at the clubhouse besides and a couple of guys who have contacted me personally.  That doesn’t sound like many volunteers but we are going to take the optimistic view that when you read this you will see the wisdom of preparing for a disaster before it happens and get thee to the clubhouse and sign up.

There is another key ingredient to the success of this operation, Communications. All CERT team members have an FRS radio similar to the ones kids use to play with. However, ours are a tad more powerful. We feel that the entire community should have one of these radios in their homes. During the time of a disaster we would then all be linked to our communications center. You would be updated by the center as to what is going on. You could call for help. You would know the latest information from the county disaster control through our community disaster network. You would not be alone. Your phones may not work but this little radio will keep you in touch with the community. Yes you will have to buy one. We were at WalMart yesterday in the electronics department and saw they were selling 2 of these radios in a blister-pak for $10. You only need one per home so if you and a neighbor go in together on a purchase your cost for this wonderful piece of equipment would be $5. Don’t even fret over this.. just get one right now and get tied into our disaster network.

We will be talking more about this subject as time goes on. If you are thinking you might be interested in volunteering you can come to our regular weekly CERT meeting at 11:00am on Wednesday at the clubhouse. For those of you that have already said yes, this would be a good meeting for you to come to also as we are going to review how our drill is going to unfold.