Whenever danger is near...never fear...Neils is near.

Shortly after we moved into our new home, neighbors and church members started asking us about ourselves. I made the mistake of saying that I like to be involved in the community. I was referring to being involved politically. But saying that got many people excited and they asked me to serve as our neighborhood CERT team leader. CERT stands for community emergency response team. Meaning that if a disaster ever strikes that is big enough the prevent firemen, policemen, medical providers and government programs from reaching you during a disaster, the CERT team is all there is to help until you do get help from outside.

I said yes but did not realize what I was getting into. I am glad to help and wanted to learn more about our community's disaster plans. But I hope to never have to be used. For the past 3 Saturdays I have been attending a CERT training course. There I learned how to put out small fires, how to lift large objects off of people, perform light search and rescue, how to triage and treat people for injuries. I also learned how to set up a command center and organize rescue efforts.

This Saturday I get to put my newly acquired skills to use during a city wide test. We will pretend that there was a 6.8 size earthquake. There is fires and broken utilities. Main roads are impassable or closed to emergency vehicles. I need to lead a team in checking my entire neighborhood to see what damage there is(as shown by damage cards left on homes by the city.) Then I need to communicate this up the chain to my leader who has communication to the city.

This should be very interesting and doing it once will make it easier to do during a real disaster. I will blog about it after our test. Until then, I am going to look forward to it being over.