The Coming Disaster

The Coming Disaster and What’s Being Planned

Ron Thomas

The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) is the grass roots component of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On the local, Newport level the Police, Fire Department, US Coast Guard, The RED CROSS and paramedics spent hours in class room situations teaching the first and second classes of CERT volunteers. Of those two classes Longview Hills has the largest group. ... 8 volunteers.

We were all graduates of the very first class, charter members if you will. Each team member has undergone a police background check to assure the community they are not criminals and were issued equipment and identification.

In order for us to prepare our community for emergencies that may present in the future, our first order of business is to evolve a community emergency plan using the techniques we have been instructed in.. At the same time we need to practice drills of an increasingly realistic nature in order to gain the skill and confidence that team members must maintain and to exhibit to you, the folks that make up our community the serious nature of potential threats to Newport. In preparing ourselves we will raise the interest level and therefore the level of preparedness of you our neighbors. As a result of our training we feel a natural urgency to bring our community to the state of preparedness that it must have to successfully survive a disaster be it man made or a natural occurrence.

We will be having a Community Town hall meeting at the clubhouse on JULY 12th at 5:00pm to roll out the staging plans for our first emergency drill here at LVH. There will be a short VCR program on tsunami’s in Oregon and Washington recorded from the Weather Channel’s “It could happen here”. Some CERT team members will say a word or two about CERT. Our equipment will be displayed for people to look at and question us about. Then a detailed account of the drill agenda will be shown and the goals to be attained from it.

Two days later on Friday the 14th the drill will take place starting at 10:00am and lasting until about noon. The drill involves what is referred to as a Rapid Response Triage. It will be a method in which we will find out as much information about injuries in the park and data needed for future emergencies.. Our goal is to canvas the entire park in 40 minutes. We will ask you 3 questions. A 4th would be necessary if this were a real event. We will leave an Advisory on what you need to do. We will leave a form the answers of which will help us with rescue activities. Lastly we will leave a booklet that is a great source of emergency information.

This is impossible for 8 people to do and we may have only 6. So what we ask is that you volunteer to work under the direction of a CERT Team member. The more volunteers we have the faster the drill will go..We think that Neighborhood Watch Block Captians would be fantastic in this job. Talking about FAST. The quicker we find out what we need to know in a disaster equates to helping and rescuing the injured and infirm quickly. So you see this race for time and data is really a race to save as many lives as possible in the shortest amount of time. HELP us help you ... sign up at the clubhouse today.