So around two years ago, I finally went ahead and joined my local Community Emergency Response Team. I first became aware that CERT was a thing years and years ago in a different part of Michigan, strolling through a community first responder fair in a Meijer parking lot, and it sounded like a really interesting concept. In fact, somewhat similar to a concept I’d spitballed on LiveJournal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it turned out that FEMA and the Los Angeles Fire Department were a decade-plus ahead of me.
In brief, CERT was created as a way of training residents in basic disaster survival in LA in 1985, while creating a pool of volunteers to assist in disasters that did not personally impact them, or which they and their families were otherwise safe from. The program expanded from LA around 1993 and gained real steam in 2002.
Fast forward two decades and I was looking to get more involved in my community, especially in the age of pandemic. So I looked them up online, e-mailed the sponsor/head of the program at the fire department (also our Fire Marshal), and was told to show up at the next training night. They train monthly, and I got to do one of the coolest hands-on training sessions, which involved safely lifting huge slabs of concrete off of rescue dummies. So I was pretty hooked. I think it was the following week and a massive water main broke and took out water to half of our city for a week or so. So I jumped right in and spent a couple hours here and there each day handing out bottled water at the fire department.
As cool as that was, if I wanted to do stuff outside of our community (volunteering for wide area searches, helping conduct storm damage assessments, etc.) I had to do their 20 hour basic training program. This week, I finally got to do that as our fire department hosted a class for the first time since before I joined up. The training was interesting and engaging, and it was fun to work through the class with a bunch of people encountering CERT for the first time. As the Fire Marshal predicted when I came to my first training session, and upon hearing my background as a Marine, there wasn’t a ton in the class that I had not already learned along the way. But it was nice to see it all put together in a cohesive way, and delivered by some really knowledgeable and experienced folks.
Chances are I’ll probably document a bit more of my CERT experience as time goes by. Generally, I’m sure it’s either going to be training, or supporting planned municipal events (the holiday parade, 5ks, that kind of thing), but I find that interesting enough on its own. Like I said, a big part of my motivation was to get active in my actual community, and what I’ve been able to do through CERT has been quite rewarding in that way so far.