Mike: Hi, I'm Mike Cappannari, and this is the FEMA broadcast. When it comes to disasters there's no way to predict when the next one will occur, but we can do things to prepare. FEMA's Community Emergency Response Team training or CERT, is one way to help communities to prepare for a disaster or large event. Today we'll learn more about these teams from two special guests. Phil Amtower is the coordinator for Christian County CERT as well as the Task Force Leader for Missouri CERT 1, a regional CERT team located in southwest Missouri. And we have Christopher Carol. Chris is the KCMO or Kansas City Missouri CERT coordinator. Welcome gentlemen. Phil: Thank you. Chris: Thank you for having us. Mike: So Chris, let me start with you. I know that you have trained multiple people for Kansas City. Can you tell us what exactly the CERT program is? Chris: Community Emergency Response Team program, it's a nationwide or nationally recognized program to train normal individuals, family members, friends in how to be better prepared for themselves, but more importantly to be able to help family members, neighbors in the immediate aftermath of a major emergency. CERT participants learn a variety of skills from how to prepare themselves for disaster, but they also learn some basic skills such as light search and rescue, emergency medical, learn about disaster psychology, a little bit about terrorism. Just all kinds of broad topics and information regarding how to be prepared in a disaster. The nice part about the CERT, because it's under FEMA and Citizen Corps, is that if we train them here in Kansas City and they move to another part of the country, Los Angeles, Maine, wherever, that certification is still recognized. Mike: That's great. You know, hearing you talk, our FEMA Administrator Brock Long, what he has been talking about, quite a bit lately, is the importance of kind of think of it as life skills. You mentioned CPR, some of those other basic skills that often get lost when, you know, we talk about Emergency Management Doctrine and things of that nature, but just hearing you go through some of what CERT really tries to highlight and to get people up to speed on really falls in line with what the administrator has been talking about so thanks for going through that description with us there. Chris: Hey, you're welcome. And I would like to mention that CERT does not normally teach CPR. We leave that to the American Red Cross and other organizations, The American Heart Association. What we teach in disaster medical is walking into a room full of 30 people, they're all injured, what do you do? Mike: Ok. Got you, so still important stuff, but good clarification. Thanks Chris. Phil turning to you I understand that you have a local CERT team as well as a regional CERT team. Can you explain how the regional team works? Phil: Yes. We call ourselves MOCERT 1, and we are kind of modeled after the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams. We took that concept and kind of adapted it to our CERT program. Normally a FEMA Urban Search and Rescue team they have doctors, engineers, firefighters, EMTs. Every day they go to their normal jobs. If there is a disaster or some major event they all assemble and form a well-trained responsible team. In our area we have about 8 active CERT teams, and we kind of operate the same way. So a normal every day, we have our own administrative functions we have our own teams, our own leaders, but if there is a large event or incident we can bring that team together to have a larger, more deployable team. We have more resources and more toys to play with that way, and we can be gone for longer if we need to. I found out that we have quite a few CERT people on our team, but if you ask them to go somewhere for a couple days, or even week to some other part it really cuts down on our available pool personnel. People are busy, they have jobs a lot of times these volunteers have to take vacation days to do that so it might be that I only have 5% of my team that can go somewhere for two days to do a particular task but if I add all those other 8 in and take their 5%, then we have a bigger team and we can go somewhere and handle whatever task we need to. Mike: Yeah, so when I think about the words "task force" in this context I usually think about the USAR or Urban Search and Rescue teams so I appreciate that analogy there. What made you, I guess, come up with this idea? Phil: Well, it really came about on a Joplin tornado. Which was a large event and we are only about 60 miles from there, so we took a lot of our folks. I think we preformed over 3,000 hours of volunteer work there, doing various functions. We kept our progress up on Facebook and then there were other teams that saw that and said, "Hey, can we go with you", and so we said, "Sure", and liked Chris talked about a while ago was that all the training is the same, which plays well into our regional concept. If I get somebody from Polk county I know that they?ve had the same training as my folks. Same thing with his team, if we were to go to Kansas City and help them with something we know... Mike: Just plug-in kind of? Phil: Yes. Mike: Yeah, that's great. And I understand that you all were recently acknowledged at the national level. Is that right? Phil: Yes. In 2014, the Individual and Community Preparedness division of FEMA gave us the most outstanding CERT initiative, and we got to go to Washington D.C. to get our award. A humbling experience. It was exciting. Got to meet a lot of interesting people and we were proud of that. Mike: Cool, well definitely sounds like it was warranted. So Chris turning to you, earlier you were giving us an overview of CERT. Maybe if you could talk a little bit about what classes that CERT training consist of. Chris: Yes. As we've mentioned, the CERT training is national standard. So we've been mandated by FEMA to train specific items and topics, although we do have a little bit of leeway in that we can tailor to the region. For example, our first unit which is disaster preparedness talks about all kinds of disasters that you can encounter. Because we're in Kansas City we cut out the how to prepare for a volcano part. Mike: Right, probably smart. Chris: So we're not thinking of too much of an issue there. Mike: Tsunami preparedness. Chris: Yeah, no Tsunami preparedness. But a lot of the rest of it is pretty standard. Our unit 2, which is fire safety, we teach the CERTS how to recognize what causes a fire, the principle components of a fire, how to be safe during a fire and we give them the opportunity to extinguish a small fire using a fire extinguisher. Now we don't train on-duty firefighters. We train them to do small fires, something you can put out with a fire extinguisher but we are lucky in that we can partner with the local power, the local utility companies, our gas company and our electric company, and we have the experts come in and they teach them a little more about gas safety and electrical safety as well, when they are out responding. The next units 3 & 4 are disaster medical 1 & 2, which we talked about before. It's not CPR. We're not necessarily teaching you how to deal with one-on-one. We're teaching you how deal with a room full of injured people, how to triage them. Which triage is the ability to separate people into how critical the nature of their injuries are, anywhere from what we call "green," which is, "They're fine. Maybe just need a Band-Aid," to more serious levels of injury, and then once they've done that, then they can go in and treat the critically. We teach them how to treat the critically injured to save their lives. Mike: It's prioritizing. Chris: Yeah, prioritizing. But it's all about... The main mission of CERT, the mantra that we like to drill into them, is, "Do the most good for the most people in the quickest amount of time," so that?s why we don't teach CPR because that means you're tied up with the one person. And five, which is light Search and Rescue. I want to [reiterate] we're not teaching them to be them to be USAR teams, urban search and rescue teams, we're teaching them how to go into a lightly or undamaged building or area, because we also teach outdoor search and rescue, and search for people that need help. Then the next three call the classroom, again part of the national curriculum, but we teach team organization so that a CERT member can organize themselves with either other CERT teams or we also teach them the ability of, they're in their neighborhood, they are the only person that's been CERT trained, how to quickly train and organize just their neighbors and friends into a cohesive and efficient team to help the rest of the neighbors in the neighborhood. And finally we have disaster psychology and terrorism. Very important, disaster psychology. People don't realize how worn down and stressed that they can become helping other people, but also how stressed people become in a disaster. Your friend, who normally you joke and have a good time with, tornado just taken out their house, they might be a completely different person. And incorporating that disaster psychology we also have provided training for the functional and access needs community. How to deal with someone who's blind, how to deal with someone who's deaf, how to deal with someone who might have mental or cognitive issues as well, so they can truly help the whole community. And then finally, once we've taught them all of those things, we throw them into a dark basement with live victims, we use moulage to simulate various injuries, and we have them organize themselves, set up a medical area, organize Search and Rescue teams. As a structure, it's a lot of fun, but it's really a good way to drive home what they've been taught, and they really enjoy it from a standpoint of, it's one thing to read and write a paper on a test, but it's another thing to actually have someone who's, like, clinging on you saying, "Help me, help me!", and to see these injuries, they really enjoy that. Total class time for Kansas City, we use 24 hours. Broken down, the national standard is 20 hours, but we like that extra four hours for our full scale disaster. In Kansas City, we break that up into various ways. We can do three weekends at eight hours a day. We do six evenings for four hours. We could do it in like 12, two-hour sessions, but... Mike: Long days. Chris: Yeah, and it leads for a long-- at least for a few months. And I'm not sure my instructors would like two, 12-hour sessions either. Mike: Right. Chris: But we can accommodate, particularly if we have a group that wants to come in and train together. Especially if they have a facility, we can accommodate their schedules. Mike: And just to reinforce a point that both of guys were making earlier, so Kansas City, pretty major metropolitan area, you know, about 2 million people or so, Christian County, obviously a more rural area of Missouri, but in terms of curriculum, Phil, what you just heard Chris go over, it's more or less the same, right? I mean, in terms of the topics and the areas of emphasis. Phil: Yes, the baseline is the same. And that is the beauty of the program. Chris and I could go to California or West Virginia, and it's the same there. And sometimes we add things. We partner with the Health Department. The Health Department is charged with setting up PODs for mass vaccination, so we provide a lot of volunteers to the Health Department in the event of that type of emergency. So sometimes, and not all the time, but we'll add about a two hour module, and the Health Department will come in and give the POD operations overview. So certain volunteers could be used for the administrative functions, you know, check in and check out, door greeters and parking, if we had to open up a POD somewhere... Mike: So you can kind of tailor, you know, like you were just talking about, the Points of Distribution or PODs, but the baseline is always going to be the same. Phil: If he asked, Chris wanted some of my volunteers to come up and help him, he knows what he's getting, and vice versa. Mike: That's great. Well, Phil, just, earlier you were talking a little bit about your experiences in Joplin, and just wondering if you could talk through that a little bit more, or if there are, maybe some other, more recent events that you all participated in that you wanted to just highlight. Phil: We have a citizen's corps in our county, CERT is only a small part actually, we have the volunteers police service, and an amateur radio, and we have DART, a Disaster Animal Response Team. So we have that full spectrum of the Citizens Corps. We seem to get involved in a lot of things in the county and, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but we have been fairly disaster-free in the last few years. Knock and wood, I hope we don't have? Mike: Fingers crossed. Phil: Yes. You need to keep the people motivated, and you need to keep them together. Give them something to do. If you don't give them something to do, they are going to go volunteer somewhere else. Mike: It seems like that would be the challenge, is kind of like, outside of that disaster mode, just keeping the momentum, the enthusiasm alive. Phil: Yes. It really is. Just last week, we had a Big River Jam, it's called in our county, and we did the parking for that. Lots of things you can get them involved in and it keeps them together, they become friends, so it makes a much better team. We have a pretty good Search and Rescue Team. We do searches for missing persons, so if our Sheriff's Department or the local Police Department need help with finding someone, we have a lot of people that are trained in Search and Rescue. We have the FEMA class coming up in our county next month. We do fire prevention week activities at school. Our Citizens Corps has a Surrey Fire Safety Trailer that we put the kids through it. We can put smoke in there and teach them how to crawl out of the house, you know, if it's smoky. That's a lot of fun, one of my favorite times of the year, playing with the kids. Mike: Having three younger kids myself, I could see them getting a kick out of that type of stuff. Phil: They love it. They love to see the fireman come in with the smoke. And Joplin was a big event, and we've talked about this a lot, but one of the times I was most proud of my volunteer team, we went over the first few days, and some of those folks that are good in Search and Rescue, they kind of integrated with some of the other teams that needed, you know, some extra personnel [because] we don't have the equipment that those folks do, but uh, they can help with the administrative and logistic stuff. We were called over, oh a few days later, the Red Cross wanted us to help with some logistic things, and we got there and they'd already had that function covered. With one lady who was almost in tears, she had a list of 315 people that she was tasked with finding. Now, normally, the Red Cross doesn't look for people, they do their Safe and Well Program. So if you're a victim of disaster there is a website that you can go on and list yourself as "safe and well," and then if somebody out, a state or wherever, is looking for you, they can go on there and see if you're okay. Well, in this case, they had so many, it was such a big disaster and they were looking for so many people. Those folks that were on that list didn't meet the normal Department of Public Safety's missing person. So if you want to go somewhere and list somebody as missing you have to be a close relative, you have had to see them, you have had to have seen them within the last few days or whatever. These 350 people were valid, I mean, there were folks looking for them, so we took that list from them. Our CERT folks set about finding those people. They had to become detectives. It was amazing to see what they'd come up with to find these folks. We'd use Facebook. We went-- Usually the first thing we went is to their residence. Sometimes it would be just totally gone, and you'd fondle through the rubble, and dig, and find a cell phone or whatever you could, you know, to try to get some evidence on where those folks, where these folks were. It was amazing. After it was all said and done we found, I think, everybody but one. Mike: Out of the 350. Wow. Phil: It was a learning experience. There were some people that didn't want to be found, naturally. Mike: Right. Phil: You can imagine that people would take advantage of a disaster to do things that are not totally right. Mike: Right. Phil: So we had to keep that in mind, but I have never been more proud of a group of people at that moment. Mike: Thanks for going through that experience there. Chris, what about you? Any recent examples that you wanted to highlight? Chris: Like Phil said, you know, we had a bit of a lack of disasters. Mike: Right. Which, again, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Chris: Yeah, not necessarily a bad thing, but we did have the Oak Grove tornado last year. Mike: That's right. Chris: And our CERT team joined other CERT teams to do damage assessment and kind of door-to-door checks on people. So they really enjoyed that, and that's one thing I would like to say about the person that joins a CERT team, they are very much wanting to help their community. With the lack of disasters, they want things to do so we've participated with the American Red Cross and Kansas City Fire Department every year. They team up to provide free smoke detectors to those low income families in places like that, that may not necessarily be able to afford smoke detectors. So they do partner up with them and participate in that every year where they go around and they will install smoke detectors for the people. In addition, we have a number of exercises that we like to keep them active throughout the year. One of the favorite ones is we partner with the Kansas City Zoo and for the day we take them into the Zoo and we do a search and rescue in an old abandoned part, so it's all creepy and overgrown, and they really enjoy that. It keeps their search and rescue skills honed up. Mike: Got you. So let me ask, hearing you both talk about it, going through the program, what is the best way to sign up? Starting with you Chris, so then for you Phil. Would it be connecting with the town, the emergency management? What's the best way to just get connected with CERT? Chris: To get connected with CERT, go to the citizen corps website. That lists all of the CERT teams throughout the nation and you can find the one that's closest to you. Most of the teams usually have some kind of residency requirement. Like for Kansas City, you have to live, work or somehow be associated with Kansas City. So like you for instance, even though you like in Kansas, you work in Kansas City, so you could join our team. Hint, hint. Mike: Got it. Chris: The nice part is that Kansas City offers free, free of charge, all you have to do is show up and give us your time and we will run you through the trainings and if you're interested in joining Kansas City you can contact me. Go to our website, KCMO.gov, or you can call at 816-513-8603. If you're not part of Kansas City, I will look up and see what CERT team you can join. Mike: Alright, thanks Chris. What about you, Phil? Phil: You know, the same thing. The easiest way is to go to the national website and it will list all of the active CERT teams. We have a Christian County CERT Facebook page, and usually you can find us there, or ema.christiancountymo.gov and you can sign up for CERT on the website. Mike: So it sounds like no matter where you are, whether you're in Missouri, Vermont, California, the Citizen Corps web page will be the best resource to find out what's closest to you, and good way to get connected there. Alright, one thing that I wanted to mention was workplace CERT. Some of those programs. So workplace CERT is designed to operate in any type of workplace environment. Workplace CERT program can support and enhance existing capabilities and CERT volunteers can participate in efforts to increase preparedness and resilience of the workplace in the community where, let's face it, so many of us spend our time. A workplace CERT team equips employees with skills that enable them to perform basic disaster operations in an emergency, much of what Chris and Phil have just been talking through. Each workplace CERT program will be unique to the specific needs of the workplace it serves. It's always going to be tailored, of course, to those specifics. Have either of you worked with a workplace CERT? Are you familiar with that? Chris? Chris: We've trained a number of businesses. Somewhat recently we trained the security company that provides security for Crown Center, which is a major shopping area in Kansas City, and we've worked with churches, universities, UMB bank, that's another team. As I mentioned, the group wants to form a CERT team, or get some CERT training, they just contact us. Again, it's free. It's good because they help their business and they're a great resource if we do have a disaster we can call on them to help the community at large. I'd also like to mention that every two years we partner with Avila University and we have what's called team CERT. Avila has a program where they help train at-risk teens to become more productive in society and they call us in because this is good life skills for those young individuals to have. Mike: And that's one of the Catholic Colleges in the area. Is that right? Yeah, got you. Chris: But the program itself in non-denominational. Mike: Right, right. Chris: It's a good program. At the end, if they pass their classes they can get scholarships and university credit. It really helps them get ahead in life and we're very proud to be a part of that. Mike: I wasn't... We were talking earlier, and I've had some background working with citizen corps and CERT, but I had not heard of the workplace CERT before. Do you have any experience with that? Phil: No not really. We teach a lot to churches. We have all of our CERT class materials in the trailer, so we can tailor it to a business or any organization. In Christian County we don't have a lot of big businesses, it's mainly small business, but still there, that's a... I think a thing that needs to happen. And like you said, this is life skills. I guarantee you, at some point in time in your life you're going to use what you learned in CERT training, whether it's at a car wreck, or a disaster, or some type of home emergencies, so I recommend that anybody and everyone should take this training. Mike: That's like I was telling you all from earlier today, just where I live in Shawnee, Kansas, within the past couple of days, literally, [I] got a notification from the next door app, which sent information out about a class starting in Shawnee, and I was telling my wife about the discussion I was going to have with you guys, and I was like, "You know I really should be practicing what I preach here, and I need to engage," but I also understand Chris is making a pitch for the Kansas City CERT. Either way it's all good stuff. So before we wrap, is there anything you guys wanted to... anything else you wanted to add? Chris: We can do associated if you wanted to. No, I would kind of just like to add that CERT is there for everyone and even if you don't want to join our CERT team, just to have the knowledge and the skills means that it's one less person, one less family that, as an emergency manager, I don't have to worry so much about. I know you've got the skills to help your family. Mike: Devote your resources elsewhere, yeah. Chris: But if you want to join the team that's even better. Mike: Anything from your perspective? Phil: No, I just reiterate what Chris stated and it is really valuable training and anyone that takes it, I think, will see that, and everyone that has been to our class has enjoyed it. You never know when a disaster is going to strike your community and it's better to be prepared than not. Mike: Absolutely. Well let me just say, I think you're both fantastic advocates for the CERT program. I very much mean that, hearing you just go through your experiences here today. I want to thank both of you for joining us today. We have learned a lot about CERT teams, I know I certainly have, and their importance to the whole community to be prepared for a disaster. We've linked this episode on the FEMA Facebook page and we invite you to join the conversation in the comments. 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