IS-909: Community Preparedness: Implementing Simple Activities for Everyone

IS-909 is something that we believe all CERT's should take and the course discription says it all....

Support the development of prepared, vigilant, and engaged communities.

• Foster strategic partnerships among:
  • The private sector.
  • Nongovernmental organizations.
  • Foundations.
  • Community-based organizations.

Get involved in National Preparedness Month.

This September: A Time to Remember. A Time to Prepare.
By Darryl J. Madden, Director, Ready Campaign

This September will mark the ten year anniversary of 9/11 and we ask you to take time to remember
those lost as well as time to make sure you are prepared for future emergencies. September is National
Preparedness Month (NPM), which was founded after 9/11 to increase preparedness in the U.S. It is a
time to prepare yourself and those in your care for an unexpected emergency.

If you’ve seen the news recently, you know that emergencies can happen unexpectedly in communities
just like yours, to people like you. We’ve seen tornado outbreaks, river floods and flash floods, historic
earthquakes, tsunamis, and even water main breaks and power outages in U.S. cities affecting millions
of people for days at a time.

This September, please prepare and plan in the event you must go for three days without electricity,
water service, access to a supermarket, or local services for several days. Just follow these three steps:

1. Get a Kit: Keep enough emergency supplies on hand for you and those in your care – water,
non-perishable food, first aid, prescriptions, flashlight, battery-powered radio – for a checklist of
supplies visit Ready.gov.
2. Make a Plan: Discuss, agree on, and document an emergency plan with those in your care. For
sample plans, see Ready.gov. Work together with neighbors, colleagues and others to build
community resilience.
3. Be Informed: Free information is available to assist you from federal, state, local, tribal, and
territorial resources. You can find preparedness information by:
Accessing Ready.gov to learn what to do before, during, and after an emergency
Contacting your local emergency management agency to get essential information on
specific hazards to your area, local plans for shelter and evacuation, ways to get information
before and during an emergency, and how to sign up for emergency alerts if they are
available
Contacting your local firehouse and asking for a tour and information about preparedness
Police, fire and rescue may not always be able to reach you quickly, such as if trees and power lines are
down or if they're overwhelmed by demand from an emergency. The most important step you can take
in helping your local responders is being able to take care of yourself and those in your care; the more
people who are prepared, the quicker the community will recover.

As FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate reminds us, "Individuals and families are the most important
members of the nation's emergency management team. Being prepared can save precious time if there is
a need to respond to an emergency." For more information on NPM and for help getting prepared, visit
Ready.gov or call 1-800-BE-READY, 1-888-SE-LISTO, and TTY 1-800-462-7585 for free information.

This September: A Time to Remember. A Time to Prepar

Crisis Data coming to Condo/HOAs via CERT?

If you have not heard of Crisis Data then you are already behind the curve on how Incendent managment is now being sturctured and hopefully this blog will peak your interests and get you digging into the how Emergency Professional are now responsidng to major crisis like GulfOlil, Haiti & Pakistan and to ones in your 4 unit condo or 5000 home community.

The major players in the emergency response world from FEMA to Redcross have all been involved in a collective effort to use socialmedia and cloud based services for incident response, now planning and soon trainning for all hazards ~ with all the modern tools that are at our disposal.

The ICA believes that it is imperative that Common Interest Communities get involved in the discussion with their local governments on the EOP, Emergency Operations Plan, because we know that CIC are the lastmile in this equation and for the most part they have been shut out of the whole process.

So Condominums, Cooperatives, Single Family & Townshouse Associations if you didnt know that last month was National Prevention Month and that your community was being encourged to talk about what we need to do as a nation and as a community to prepare, train, respond and review all hazards in your Condo, Coop or Hoa then we need to get moving.

Here is a shot example of what crisis data starts off as. 





to learn more about please visit crisisdata.us

Welcome Community Cert

Sure CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Team, 

We know our program director Nelson Jacobsen was one of the first CERT's outside of California to be trained in CERT and he particapted in the very first series of Train the Trainer classes given by FEMA that brought citizens like Nelson into the Natioanl Incendent Response Plan and now we are going to be bringing this to the Common Interest Communities in your neighborhood. 

We will be working with exisitng CERT programs and helping to establish them in Condo's Coops and Homeowners Associations all across the USA.  If your interested in learning more about how CERT and our Community Cert program this blog if the one you want to bookmark and visit often.