2023 Santa Clara County CERT Skills Day
150 CERT volunteers from around Santa Clara County gathered on Saturday, January 21, 2023 at the Quinlan Community Center in Cupertino to practice their skills. They were joined by 65 instructors and staff, and 50 BSA scouts and scout parents acting as “victims,” for a total of nearly 300 people.
Use the arrow keys or your mouse to browse through the pictures from this event, click the play button at the top right to see a slide show, or scroll left or right to skip to a section of interest. You can also jump directly to any one of our four skill areas: Incident Command System, Radio Communications, Search and Rescue, or Disaster Medicine.
Publicity
Many CERT programs in the county posted about this event on their social media. Here’s an example post from Sunnyvale.
KRON-4 TV Coverage
KRON-4 sent a reporter out to cover the event. The report was aired on Saturday evening after the event.
Arrival and Setup
Staff arrived well before dawn to set up for this event. Participants started arriving around 7:30am. By 8:00am, the participants were all checked in, and enjoying breakfast snacks courtesy of Costco, Peet’s Coffee, and Starbuck’s Coffee. They got a welcome and safety briefing, and were sworn in as Disaster Service Workers. Then it was time to get started with the skills practice!
Incident Command System
Participants practiced skills in four different areas during the day, in rotation. The first skill area was using the Incident Command System to manage a disaster scenario. ICS is used nationwide for management of emergencies and disasters. Here, participants exercised it using a tabletop simulation called “ICSLand,” developed locally by Dimitri Volkmann in Sunnyvale.
Radio Communications
The second skill area for participants was Radio Communications. In a disaster, the use of radios for communications is indispensable. This skill area helped CERT volunteers be familiar with the operation of two way radios and the protocols for using them effectively. This skill area was taught by skilled radio operators from the Santa Clara County Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES).
Search and Rescue
The third skill area for participants was Search and Rescue: how to safely find survivors in a disaster and get them to a place of safety.
Damage Assessment
The Search and Rescue skill area focused on three specific skills. The first of those was damage assessment: how to determine, looking at a building, whether it’s safe for rescuers to enter at all. They exercised this skill by looking at pictures of damaged buildings, assessing them, and reporting their findings in a structured way.
Making Entry
The second skill in the Search and Rescue area was making entry: the ability to enter a building safely. This skill also covers the markings that rescuers leave on the outside of a building when they search it, so that others who follow them will know what was found.
Lifts and Carries
The third skill in the Search and Rescue area is lifts and carries: how to safely move survivors out of a damaged building. There are many styles of lifts and carries, but this training focused on two of them: the two-person chair carry, and the multi-person blanket carry. BSA scouts from Saratoga and Los Altos Hills acted as our survivors to be carried for this exercise.
Lunch
Between the third and fourth skill areas, we broke for lunch, paid for by the various local CERT programs.
Disaster Medicine
The fourth and final skill area was Disaster Medicine: the ability to prioritize and treat injuries during a disaster, when professional responders are unavailable.
For realism, we practiced our medical skills on BSA scouts and parents from Saratoga and Los Altos Hills, who were given fake injuries by our talented staff of moulage artists.
Triage
In a disaster, there are more patients needing treatment than there are people who know how to treat them. Care must be taken to focus rescuers’ efforts on the people who can benefit the most from treatment: those who might die without it. To achieve this, we prioritize or “triage” patients into color-coded categories: green for minor injuries, yellow for more serious injuries that don’t need immediate treatment, and red for the ones who need treatment the most.
Treating Injuries
Once patients are triaged, it’s time to actually treat their injuries. The participants in this event got practice particularly in bandaging wounds and splinting fractures.
Group Photos
At the end of the day, a couple of cities had group photos for their CERT volunteers. Unfortunately these were not well announced and were missed by many who might have wanted to be in them. But still, here they are....
Be Ready!
Disasters can strike at any time, often in surprising ways. The participants in this event are now that much better prepared to handle any disasters that may occur. You can join them! If you are a member of your city’s CERT team, make sure to take part in their occasional refresher training sessions. If you’re not, consider signing up for your city’s CERT training so that you can be ready to help your neighbors and community in a disaster!
Visit scc-cert.org for more information.