How many squadrons here have an effective CERT team? Has your wing supported that effort?
Lack of interest in ground teams in our area. We never get called, so people get tired of training it seems, and let it expire, or never start.
We have a local opportunity to get CERT training, but when polled to see if its viable, not many hold up their hands.
Our Wing does a lot of FEMA photo missions and similar, but just are not getting much action on the ground from local agencies.
Other Wings may be just the opposite.
Despite the rhetoric, CERT is not a CAP "thing".
If you want to do CERT, join your local CERT team.
(Now, please rush to the keyboard to tell us about "that one time"...)
Quote from: Eclipse on January 15, 2020, 08:52:27 PM
Despite the rhetoric, CERT is not a CAP "thing".
If you want to do CERT, join your local CERT team.
(Now, please rush to the keyboard to tell us about "that one time"...)
We have people in our Wing claiming that if we get our ground team members CERT trained, that local EMAs and others would be more likely to involve us in SAR(?) I don't have a clue if it would help or not, its just the message we are getting. Either way, as I said above, not many hands are being raised anyway.
Quote from: etodd on January 15, 2020, 09:05:50 PM
Quote from: Eclipse on January 15, 2020, 08:52:27 PM
Despite the rhetoric, CERT is not a CAP "thing".
If you want to do CERT, join your local CERT team.
(Now, please rush to the keyboard to tell us about "that one time"...)
We have people in our Wing claiming that if we get our ground team members CERT trained, that local EMAs and others would be more likely to involve us in SAR(?) I don't have a clue if it would help or not, its just the message we are getting. Either way, as I said above, not many hands are being raised anyway.
Not likely also CAP GT and CERT are completely different things, and for the most part the
disciplines do not intersect.
Regardless, CAP doesn't do CERT training, so those member who got training would have to do so via
their local municipalities and similar, and then they can just join those teams.
CAP's bureaucracy and long spin-up times are essentially the antithesis of CERT which is intended to
be neighbors helping themselves and their neighbors, not an expeditionary helper force. In most cases
where CERT is needed, the incident is over, or well in hand, before CAP would be able to even get an alert out.
In my state, Vermont, CERT is organized at the state level. One has to register with the state, get photographed, and go through a criminal background check to be a CERT member. Then, to deploy on an assignment, the deployment has to be approved by the Department of Emergency watch officer.
In practice, CERT has seldom been requested or approved, the members have lost interest, and it is effectively defunct. People interested in that sort of thing have usually been people who had some other affiliation before joining CERT, such as amateur radio, volunteer EMS, volunteer fire, or the medical reserve corp. So these folks have just ignored CERT and responded with their other organization when something has come up.
The role I see for CERT is in urban areas, day-to-day emergency response is thoroughly professionalized, and the ambulance services, fire departments, etc. aren't interested in volunteers. In this setting the CERT folks could supplement the career people for incidents where the professional services are overwhelmed. But in my area, where even the few career emergency agencies call neighboring volunteer agencies for mutual aid at least several times a month, CERT is an extra wheel.
look at this map, if you wanna do SAR on the east coast it's not likely you'll get called... the west coast is an entirely different story.
Of those saves on that map: how many were cell forensics saves?
Quote from: NIN on January 16, 2020, 11:00:27 PM
Of those saves on that map: how many were cell forensics saves?
Darn close to 100 percent I'll bet.
Breakdown of the 37 saves:
27 cell team only
2 joint saves with wings
1 joint save with the radar team
-------------
30 of 37 involved the cell team
4 radar team only
3 no radar or cell
-------------
37 saves
Quoteook at this map, if you wanna do SAR on the east coast it's not likely you'll get called... the west coast is an entirely different story.
The map doesn't show "SAR," it shows saves, which is a small subset of SAR. There are many other SAR missions scattered all over the country that didn't include opportunities for saves.
Mike