Sunday, December 20, 2009

Rockin' and rollin'

I spent the last week in Maryland attending a class for Earthquake Preparedness.  The title struck me as odd because my idea of EQ preparedness is to say "oh sh**" and run like the dickens from the chaos of the world shaking around me.  There's really no training required for that response and I've got it down to a science.

Okay so that's not really my response to the ground shaking, rumbling, wooziness also known as earthquakes.  They are, however, unnerving to me because they come with no warning.  For those few seconds, your heart may race and your world is physically shaken but it all calms down and life is good.  Sort of.  In reality, you're waiting for the next temblor knowing that they rarely come alone.  I compare this to scary movies when you just know for certain that there's another scary guy around the corner.

The class focused on the scope of emergency responses for such events.  Whew! Imagine my relief when I realized the class wouldn't be running sprints to the door to see who got out of the building the fastest.  Ready.....set......go! 


Seriously though.  It's astounding to see the scope of agencies, people, equipment, resources, cooperation, coordination and communication (the three C's, they call it) and ingenuity that comes into play during a catastrophe such as an earthquake.  Dispatching will still be my role if a catastrophe ever strikes and this class helped emphasize that every role is important.  All levels of emergency responders and management will be involved from the upper echelon to the little people.  And all levels will have something to contribute, something that puts the extra piece of the puzzle into place.

There's no need for details of lessons learned, presentations or class literature on the blog here though.
It was just nice to go to training that I feel will be useful.  It was nice to see that the team truly does consist of everyone.  There is some amazing talent out there in the world of emergency responders but I knew that before class began. (wink and smile)
Posted by PJ at 1:11 PM
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1 comment:

  1. UnknownDecember 31, 2009 at 2:37 PM

    Sounds like your training was really useful, Paula. Brad and I have taken the Citizen Emergency Response Team (CERT) training given by Walnut Creek to prepare the community to be ready in an earthquake. CERT areas are divided up by grade school boundaries with a designated command post which is usually a city park or city owned property. Right now our CERT team is stocking our command post cache and working on radio, search and rescue and medical triage drills in order to get ready to put on a big city wide drill in May for the recent CERT graduates. We have a lot of work to do!

    Brad just got his HAM license so he and several other HAMs in our area will be in charge of the communication component.I'm helping organize the Incident Command structure for our area but during our drills and the actual earthquake, I'll run the DART (Disaster Animal Response Team) section. This CERT job is interesting but it is taking quite a bit of our time as many volunteer jobs tend to do.

    Many cities here in earthquake prone California are doing the same training for their citizens since we all know the "big one" is coming. Unfortunately, in the past many people took the CERT training but never did much to get involved in organizing their neighborhood or area of the city. That is changing and more expectations are put on course graduates to be active. We need more people in our area to step up and take on some of the many jobs we have. Hopefully that will happen as we prepare for our big May drill.

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