CERT classes offer eight-week disaster training free of
charge
A group of San Benito residents are midway through Community
Emergency Response Team training, a program put together by the
Federal Emergency Management Agency to prepare residents to respond
in an emergency.
The San Benito County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services is
the sponsoring agency, and Brad J. Klemek is the program
coordinator.
CERT classes offer eight-week disaster training free of charge
A group of San Benito residents are midway through Community Emergency Response Team training, a program put together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to prepare residents to respond in an emergency.
The San Benito County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services is the sponsoring agency, and Brad J. Klemek is the program coordinator.
“The philosophy behind CERT is trying to train interested local citizens in emergency services and how to best prepare themselves, their families and their neighborhoods to weather out the first several days following large-scale disasters,” said Jim Clark, the manager of OES. “It helps to be self-sufficient.”
Clark and Klemek said the county received funding from FEMA to start the CERT program. The hope is that they will be able to train 100 residents this year, but they will need to find other funding sources to offer more sessions. Klemek said one of the things that prompted the county to start up the classes again was a recent study conducted by the California Emergency Management Agency, which looked at the Bay Area region.
“It went county to county,” Klemek said. “It goes up to the California-Oregon border. It analyzed the resources and how all different counties respond in a catastrophic event, like a repeat of Loma Prieta.”
At the end of the study, a list of recommendations went out to each county.
“In San Benito, part of that was to develop a stronger volunteer organization – a combination of working with the Red Cross and other volunteer programs that help support the response to catastrophic disaster.”
Klemek completed the CERT training in 2009, when the county had a grant through the state emergency management agency.
“I was in that very first class and there were 12 of us who went through the program,” Klemek said.
Klemek, who has a background in fire service, worked with Clark to apply with FEMA to get a CERT program approved in San Benito. They got approval in December.
“I applied for a grant from FEMA that provides the backpacks, the individual safety gear for the participants, helmets, vest and all the manuals and curriculum,” Klemek said.
He and Clark started gathering names of interested residents in January.
“We had 30 people interested and we didn’t have instructors lined up,” Klemek said. “Finally I got tired of waiting. I went to FEMA and took all the required training. I had to go through an instructor program.”
The CERT training is an eight-week program that meets for three hours. The class covers such topics as fire safety, disaster medical operations, light search and rescue, CERT organization and more. Each class consists of a lecture or presentation along with practical activities to give some hands-on training.
Howard Evans, a volunteer with the American Red Cross, signed up for the class after hearing about it from Klemek.
“It’s just a little extra training,” he said. “For me a lot of it is a refresher because I spent time in the military … I’m just hoping to get good enough training in case of some disaster to be able to help as much as I can.”
Nicole Massie and Kathy Pemberton-Granger both got involved with CERT because they live in rural areas.
Massie said she had learned a lot from the first few sessions of the class.
“I learned to shut off power,” she said. “I live on a ranch and it has four houses on the property with four different families. I know where everything is.”
She has been sharing the tips she’s learned so far with her family and friends, and they have started putting together preparedness kits with supplies.
Pemberton-Granger heard about the program after Brad Klemek and Joe Bowman, of First Trust Industries, did a presentation of emergency preparedness at Rabobank where she works. She and her son Quinton Pemberton signed up for the class.
“I live out on Lone Tree Road,” she said. “We are going to learn how to save our block.”
In the recent evening class, the students learned about disaster medical operations. Some of the topics included how to set up a triage area and how to label people as having minor injuries, needed immediate attention or delayed attention. The lecture included information on how to handle the dead – an inevitability in a major disaster. The class members learned how to check someone for injuries from head to toe, how to apply bandages and how to apply a splint. After a short Power Point presentation, the members broke into groups to practice the skills.
The first training session has 22 residents enrolled, according to Klemek, and more are on a waiting list for the next round.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” Clark said. “I knew there was interest out there. For the last several months we had been collecting people’s (names,) many through word of mouth at the local Red Cross office.”
The classes are held at the American Red Cross office, on Fifth Street.
“From a county perspective and from an emergency management perspective, if we can enable our citizenry to be prepared for emergencies and to be able to be as self-sufficient as they possibly can – provided they don’t need anything like emergency medical care – it just helps to weather the disaster to be prepared,” Clark said. “That helps us refocus our resources, which are stretched thin to begin with, to deal with more pressing and emergency-type stuff. It takes a lot of pressure off us.”
The ultimate goal is to take the top tier of citizens who complete the CERT training and do some advanced training so that the residents might be able to assist in disasters.
“We can continue to train these folks and perhaps even get some additional instructors from the community,” Clark said.
Klemek said that it is the trend throughout the country to treat the CERT program as a two-tier program – where some participants go through the training and prepare their own family and friends, while other participants train to take a more active role in a disaster.
“The bottom line is, if I told you that there was going to be a 7.4 earthquake next Thursday at 4 p.m., what would you do?” Klemek said. “Don’t you think it would be important to find out what you should do?”
Klemek said in a major disaster, rescue services would likely respond to urban areas such as San Jose and San Francisco before redirecting efforts in San Benito.
“Residents will be much better prepared to survive and sustain themselves until the professional rescuers arrive,” he said.
To keep the program going after the grant money is gone, Klemek said he is hoping to find community or business sponsors. Supporters of the first session include the American Red Cross Monterey Bay Chapter, as well as Bowman, of First Trust Industries, a company that sells emergency preparedness supplies.
“It’s actually a great corporate sponsor,” Klemek said. “They’ve already sunk a few $1,000 in equipment.”
