Community Emergency Response Team courses are being offered again in Rochester

ROCHESTER, NY (WROC) — Have you ever heard of the Community Emergency Response Team, or CERT? You might not have, but like many first responders, they’re people in your community ready to help when disaster strikes. CERT first arrived in New York right here in Rochester in 2002, while the program itself was initially developed in the 1980s in Los Angeles. While planning started in the late 90s, according to Battalion Chief Joseph Luna of the Rochester Fire Department, after the events of 9/11, the program began.

“We were the first community in New York State to bring CERT to New York State, and we did that in 2002. So, it was sort of, we had already started planning for it, but it sort of followed the aftermath of 9/11,” said Luna.

CERT was founded by Assistant Chief Frank Borden of the Los Angeles Fire Department, with the idea coming after he toured other disaster-prone countries and saw that citizens there were knowledgeable about how to react to disasters and take care of some things in their backyard easing the strain on first responders. Upon returning to California, CERT eventually arose in 1985 and soon spread all across the country.

“CERT is sort of based on three phases. The first one is if a disaster happens, right, whether it’s a house fire or a wildfire is how do I protect me? How do I save me and my immediate surroundings? Phase two is how do I protect my family or maybe somebody else that lives in the other half of my house or an apartment upstairs,” said Luna. “And then phase three is where I go out and I join with other like trained people and we become a team and then that team goes out into our community on sort of a mission, if you will, to take care of other people.”

In years past, most of the main times that CERT has been activated has been related to snowstorms, but one of the largest activations that our region saw was back in 2009 for the Swine Flu.

“CERT teams were asked by Monroe County Public Health to help them in 2009 when we had the swine flu epidemic, not a pandemic, but an epidemic, and they were doing vaccinations of antivirals,” said Luna.

The training is a commitment and doesn’t hold back either. The CERT course covers 9 weeks, with mandatory attendance to graduate, and covers topics ranging from Triage and Basic First Aid, to turning off gas and other utilities. The final exam even simulates a real disaster that you and your classmates have to navigate.

“There’s a lot of first aid type medicine from triaging to bandaging to splinting, things like that. And then we also go into some basic firefighting. When I say firefighting, I’m just talking [about] fire extinguishers, right? Nobody’s, you know, being thrown into any burning buildings,” said Luna. “And then search and rescue, which is not only the idea of finding someone either in a building that’s fallen over or a grid search like a lost child but then it’s also disentangling them or rescuing them from that environment, whatever that environment may be.”

While there currently aren’t any active CERT teams in our area, there are plans to begin to step up activities related to CERT as the numbers of trained members grow. To help with that, new courses are being offered with the 37th such in session right now, with plans for number 38 once this one finishes. Luna said they hope to offer the courses back-to-back following a schedule similar to college semesters for as long as there’s enough interest, and the grants continue to come in through the near future.

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