CERT Member in Action - Seegar's Story

The Citizen Reserve congratulates Seegar on his self deployment. What a great accomplishment! Read on for his story...

"I engaged in my first CERT deployment on Saturday, March 28. The Decatur Air & Light truck went past my house mid-morning, meaning that something was happening in my neighborhood. I keep my CERT kit in my car, so I put on my city CAPS (Citizens Assisting Public Safety) jacket and drove a few blocks until I found the fire crews responding to a large tree down, which was blocking a residential street and pulled power lines down both at the primary site and snapped power lines (in three places) 1.5 blocks away, which were also in the street.

I assisted Decatur Fire with marking the downed lines in the alternate location, and helped clear the scene for GA Power crews to accomplish their work. Since my CAPS training includes traffic control and direction, I directed traffic around the primary site after Decatur Fire turned the scene over to the GA Power and City tree crews, and stayed on site until my services were no longer constructive.

My CERT-vested presence was apparent to the Captain who responded to take charge of the scene. The City of Decatur Emergency Management Director personally took responsibility for the scene when first responding fire crews were dismissed, and made a point of thanking me for my efforts. Thus, various Decatur fire and emergency management folks saw an isolated but constructive CERT response in action, perhaps for the first time. I made a point of finding supplemental things to help with the situation without interjecting myself into the efforts of the professionals, but would note that wearing the vest seemed to make me part of the team that responded, both with respect to the Decatur Fire and GA Power folks responding, and the numerous neighbors who came out to watch as we secured the scene and responded to the situation."

-- Seegar Swanson
Decatur Resident
DeKalb CERT - May 2008 Class

DeKalb County CERT Takes Third Place

DeKalb County Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) took 3rd place in the First Annual GEMA CERT Challenge in Henry County on Saturday, April 4th, 2009. The team consisted of Debi Taylor, Heather Roth, Hayne Palmer, Alex Lopez, and Elliott Fried as the Team Leader.

The competition was hosted by the Georgia Emergency Management Agency and was designed to engage CERT teams from across the State to test their response skills in the areas of disaster preparedness, small fire suppression, light search and rescue, disaster psychology, and basic disaster medical operations. Although rooted in sportsmanship, the focus of the event was the networking and sharing of ideas among Georgia’s CERT volunteers in their individual county programs.

The DeKalb CERT participants scored 98, which tied us with Chatham County. There was also a Moulage Competition, in which we had to fabricate a disaster scenario and make up a victim with realistic injuries in a time-restricted session. Christened with our first hands-on experience with moulage, we still managed to take 4th place.
 Prizes included Training Aids to help continue to grow our program:

 a brand new Rescue Randy Mannequin,
 two refillable/rechargeable fire extinguishers, 
a Ben Nye Starter Moulage Kit, and seven new loaded CERT kits.

“You should be very proud of your team. I know I am very proud,” DeKalb County Fire Rescue Chief David Foster told Elliott Fried upon hearing our accomplishment.

This was the first time this event was done and the GEMA staff is looking forward to holding the next one.

Way to go, team!