Class sets up students for disaster
Hope for the best: Prepare for the worst
By Joe Johnson
joe.johnson@onlineathens.com

Brett Clark/Special
 From left, Cindy Barnette, Regena Seymour, Jane Kelly and Beverly Logan practice putting on latex gloves during a Community Emergency Response Team class Tuesday evening. The class is designed to teach members of the community how to respond in potential disaster situations. In Tuesday's class they learned the proper procedure for glove removal and how to make splints out of available resources.

A "powerful tornado" has ripped through Athens, leaving a trail of death and destruction.

In one neighborhood, a cul-de-sac on "River Hill Drive," survivors are wandering around in shock, with some of their neighbors dead, others critically injured, houses flattened and fires raging.

So many other neighborhoods have been similarly devastated throughout the county that it could take hours, perhaps even days, for professional rescue workers to arrive. It's up to residents of River Hill Drive to care for themselves, from setting up a temporary morgue to treating the injured and searching for survivors.

"You will have to be the leaders, you will have to make the tough calls," Sarah Bell, an American Red Cross official, told a group of students enrolled in the first Athens-Clarke County Community Emergency Response Team.

River Hill Drive is a fictitious neighborhood used in the training, but disasters from earthquakes in California to the recent tsunami in south Asia showed that a natural disaster can strike unexpectedly anytime, anywhere, so it's good to be prepared, Bell said.

The local CERT program is a collaborative effort between the Athens-Clarke County Fire and Emergency Services Department and the East Georgia Chapter of the American Red Cross, and the goal of the 20 hours of classroom and hands-on instruction is to train up to 100 CERT members each year, so that neighbors can help neighbors survive catastrophic events.

"We are teaching your normal, average everyday people how to help themselves and their neighbors until professional emergency response personnel can get to them," explained Athens-Clarke CERT Program Coordinator Ryan Logan.

The inaugural class began training Feb. 8, and its 25 participants range in age from 26 to 73.

Gary Keene, a 50-year-old U.S. Postal Service worker, said most people who take CERT training are already volunteer-oriented.

"It's great to know what to do in case of a disaster, be it natural or man-made," Keene said. "The goal of this (program) is that if disaster ever hits my neighborhood, we will have people trained in what to do until the professional emergency personnel can get to us."

Cindy Barnette, a 38-year-old Whitehead Road resident who is the city of Gainesville's risk manager, said the training will not only help her know what to do in her own neighborhood, but gives her new knowledge to incorporate into her job.

"This will be a real good tie-in to the emergency preparedness training we already give to our city employees," Barnette said.

Another municipal employee taking the course, Athens-County Court Clerk Beverly Logan, echoed Barnette in her reasoning for wanting the training.

"As far as being a public servant, this is helping me further my public service even more," Logan said. "But it's also a neighbor-helping-neighbor type of thing, and I just love being a part of this."

During a training session at the Jefferson Road fire station Tuesday night, Bell, chairwoman of the East Georgia Chapter's Disaster Services unit, pulled no punches about what CERT members might encounter should a major disaster strike.

Reviewing the previous week's training session, CERT trainees went over what they'd learned about how to triage injured people to determine who is dead, who needs immediate medical care and who has injuries that can be treated later on.

Volunteers might have to establish a morgue, search damaged houses for survivors and canvass the neighborhood for equipment for the rescue effort, from bottled water to shovels to electric generators.

"What I'm trying to do for you tonight is to bring up all the possible problems you may encounter," Bell said. "Think strategically. You are all leaders."

The Athens CERT program is one of 20 in the state. The Federal Emergency Management Agency began to promote the program in 1994, following a similar program created by the Los Angeles Fire Department, which has had to deal with earthquakes that stretched crews too thin to respond everywhere they were needed.

CERT training is free, and the next class is scheduled to begin April 5.

Ryan Logan urged his students to take what they learn back to their friends, co-workers and neighborhood associations to get as many people as possible trained in disaster response.

"If you've got five or six folks who are CERT-trained in a subdivision, it's going to make a much bigger impact than you will by yourself," he said.