Dozens of Orange County residents graduated from the FEMA-approved West County Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) basic training course held at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos recently.
Dozens of Orange County residents graduated from the FEMA-approved West County Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) basic training course held at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos recently.
The graduates included several physicians, teachers, students, IT managers, an attorney, retired people, marketing managers and a pilot. The class-elected incident commander was a realtor while the search and rescue team was headed by a handyman.
The graduates live in Anaheim, Buena Park, Cypress, La Palma, Los Alamitos, Seal Beach and Westminster. They all worked together during the course, which attracted people from as far away as Huntington Beach and Irvine. Although from different cities and backgrounds, each graduate shared an interest and enthusiasm for learning how to more effectively help their family, neighbors and community in the event of a natural disaster.
After absorbing the 24-hour course in disaster preparedness, the graduates broke into teams under their class incident commander. The team practiced search and rescue, logistics, and acted as medical team leaders. They also demonstrated what they had learned in a mock drill on the last day of training.
CERT trainers, professional police, fire fighters and EMTs arrived on the scene to grade the future graduates. These were not easy graders, but they all unanimously scored the class as "outstanding."
CERT is a proud partner of Citizens Corps, and aims to have everyone in America prepared and trained for a natural disaster.
The next West County CERT basic training class will be held in either March or April of 2013. For more info, visit westcountycert@yahoo.com or call 56-366-8880.
