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[CERT-LA Forum]

 CERT-LA Forum » CERT Refresher Ideas » Scenarios
 How realistic are scenarios we use?

1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever

[sandhya60]

I have found that training scenarios are really only good for training purposes, and bare no resemblance to reality.
Where I am, people live up to an hour from work, and will not be near home or work if an emergency should occur. The same holds true for emergency personnel.
I know that reality dictates that if there is an emergency, I will not be able to respond to work, and in most cases neither will supervision.
In fact, communication will be down etc.

I like to use scenerios that tell it like it would be in the worst case...
you wont see your cities emergency personnel arrive in the city, (because they cant get to work) and there will be no communication of any sort or at any level....

in fact, allot of the trained CERT people will be stuck at work or on the roads they travel, leaving their neighborhoods empty, should an emergency strike during business hours.

We can use previous models as an example...9/11 and the SF Loma Prieta earthquake...

has anyone else used the worse case scenerio for simulation purposes and training people...or do you use the scenerios that have everyone in their homes, after work with everyone at their disposal?

[Tom Barnhizer]

We are fortunate here in Toledo, Ohio in that we have the support of our Citizen Corps Council, the EMA, local Fire and law enforcement, the Red Cross and Owens State Community College to conduct our training and run scenarios. Owens operates a regional Fire and Police Academy on campus. A wood frame residential house is used by both programs and is available for us to run CERT response exercises. The College constructed a portable gas/water/electric meter stand, a welded 700 lb collapsed wall and a separate fire pan that we place outside of the house. In addition, when we run larger classes (25+) we incorporate a crashed vehicle with victims. We have the use of a smoke machine which allows us to fog the interior of the scenario house to near zero visibility. Our scenarios are generally natural disaster based where we use both live moulaged victims and manikins ("Where's my baby!"). Typically we allow 2 hours per scenario response drill which includes a debrief/after action review.

Our continuing education program only allows for 2-3 hour sessions so we improvise with a lot of debris, signage and darkness when we run simulations. Of course none of this would be possible without the support of our CERT Instructor Aides who volunteer to train new members.

[srtmedic]

[YonkersCERT]

In the City of Yonkers, which is in New York State we drill our CERT teams right along side of the Fire, Police, EMS and all other agencies involved within a disaster. Being the program coordinator i attempted to set up drills with just CERT members and found that they did not get much out of the drill.

[KE4SKY]

[AlphaSun]

[KE4SKY]