What is 'CERT'?
CERT is a program that is a nationally recognized program and it stands for Community Emergency Response Training. CERT is in the city of L.A. and it's a free seven week course. This course takes you through disaster preparation that covers anything from earthquake, to fire, to flood, to hurricane, tornados and terrorism. And then we have a chapter on fire suppression. We talk a little bit about fire chemistry at CERT, including how to use a fire extinguisher. Our third session is on triage. We talk a little bit about disaster psychology and the incident command system, which is how you run a large incident. Within our CERT agency we have this whole hierarchy in place, so if we have any incident, whether it is a fire or a medical incident, there's someone whose in charge, an incident commander. So we teach you the structure of how that works at CERT. And then the last chapter is basically what we call terrorism awareness. Things to look for when you travel, going into the websites of the councils and checking on if there are any alerts and those types of things. And then we do an exercise twice a year. We have a tremendously large exercise, where we have anywhere from between 250 to 300 people show up and we incorporate all those weeks of training and create scenarios for you, and you're working with people throughout the city to get tasks done. This is really just preparing you and giving you that information so that in the event of the next disaster you're going to fair much better.
