What Is A CERT Team?

This is possibly the most important Blog I have written.  This is a subject that should be important to every resident everywhere.  Most of us live in subdivisions, residential streets in a town.  We have neighbors.  How are we going to help ourselves and our neighbors when we experience an emergency.  Please read on…

WHAT IS A CERT TEAM?

If I were to ask you “Do you know what a C.E.R.T. team is?  What would you say?  Most people give me a blank look when I ask this. Guess what? Nearly every city in America has a C.E.R.T. team and they are very important.  I was just like you. I hadn’t heard of C.E.R.T. until a couple of years ago when I was contacted by a CERT team from Houston Texas asking me about our Bomber Jackets we sell to Search and Rescue teams. I didn’t even know what C.E.R.T stood for!

C.E.R.T. stands for Community Emergency Response Team. 

Here is a great video put out by FEMA that explains more about C.E.R.T. 

I live in a small town with 20 full-time firemen.  If we were to have a severe earthquake with gas mains breaking and houses on fire like the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, the fire department would be totally overwhelmed.  The Fire Chief of our town has said many parts of our city won’t see any emergency personnel for as much as two weeks.  That leaves us pretty much on our own.

On December 3, 2020 the Santa Ana winds whipped up (Santa Ana winds develop from weather conditions that bring warm dry winds usually from the deserts north east of us.)  A southerly gusty wind blew all during the evening and into the night.  Around midnight it got so severe the wind blew a ladder down that I had left propped against the house.

Around 2:30 am my wife woke me up saying she heard a horn blowing and the sound of a car engine revving.  I sleepily rolled out of bed to go check. As I stood up, I looked out our bedroom window and was horrified to see the entire mountainside to the northeast of us on fire! It was only quarter of a mile away and that was the direction the wind had been coming from.  I can’t remember a scarier moment in my life.  

I stumbled outside in my pajamas to find two of my neighbors across the street also in their pajamas starting to go door-to-door pounding on doors to wake people up.  Most elderly people take their hearing aids out before going to sleep and they couldn’t hear the pounding.  My neighbors pounded, and yelled and banged on windows nobody heard them.  

Just then a Riverside County Sheriff came rolling up our street with his loud speaker at full volume. “THIS IS THE RIVERSIDE COUNTY SHERRIF. THIS IS A MANDATORY EVACUATION! THERE IS A FIRE BURNING TOWARD YOUR PARK!”

Turning to look toward the north, all I could see was orange in the sky and it was getting very smokey! I went back inside to get my wife. She greeted me with a frantic, “I need all the cat carriers down!!”  I found our five cat carriers and proceeded to corral our cats into them. 

At that moment, all our lights went out.  The house was pitch black.  The only light I could come up with was the flashlight on my phone. Amazingly, the one cat that I thought would never consent to being stuffed into a carrier against her will, actually went in without a fight.  Whew!  Now to get the other four in their carriers.  We were getting the last cat into her carrier when there was a loud banging on our door. 

“This is the Riverside County Sheriff,  you have to get out of your house NOW!!”  I shouted back to him, “We are coming!”  I grabbed our laptops, cat carriers, and other things my wife hurriedly placed at the door. I put a leash on our dog and we jumped in our pickup and drove up the street… in the direction of the fire!  Unfortunately, that was the only way out of our park! I snapped this picture as we drove out.

The Fire Department sent every fire truck available to our park.  By now the fire was 150 feet from our clubhouse.  Fortunately, every spring they plow a 150 foot berm all around our park and that is what saved our park.  Once the sun came up they got the fire planes in the air and they dropped fire retardant on both sides of the mountain. The fire was pretty well out by about 10:00 that morning but we couldn’t return to our home until about 2pm. Our power was shut off and finally came back on at 7:30 that night. What an ordeal!

It really hit home to us that even though everyone got out safely and there were no injuries or damage to our park, there were so many things that could have gone horribly wrong.

We needed a CERT team STAT. Stay tuned to find out what we did next. I plan on writing several blogs on our process of developing our own CERT team for our park.

My hope by presenting this information is that more people will get involved and get CERT trained.  The training is sponsored by FEMA and is free of charge.  The Basic CERT training class is 20 hours of training.  Currently, about half of the class may be taken online due to COVID restrictions.  The other half requires hands on training and may be on hold until restrictions are lifted.  The class is fascinating, informative, and at the end of the class a simulated emergency is staged to allow attendees an opportunity to see CERT in action and to practice skills you have just learned.  Most cities also sponsor ongoing refresher courses several times a year to keep CERT teams ready.

Thank you for taking time to read through this.  I look forward to reading comments and stories of CERT teams activity and accomplishments in your town.