Good morning, no News email last week, so I have some catching up to do:
*****MIRA MESA********
Training Hours Due—By the end of the week. Even if you told me earlier in the month, take a moment to remind me, it is very important that we get your training logged in the month you took it.
Team Meeting—Thursday, 10 February, my house 10125 Baffin Drive, near Jade Coast and Camino Ruiz. Unless there is a serious objection, let's start at 6:00. We'll finish promptly at 7:00. Bring an FRS radio if you have one, and the manual if you can put your hands on it. Come anyway if you don't have one, we'll have some to share. We will go through a static exercise of setting up a controlled net, and all of us will get a little practice communicating. This is a setup for our radio drill next month. If we finish early, we will review utility shut-off procedures.
******BATTALION 5******
Training Hours Due—Please turn in any training or volunteer hours to your Team Leader by Friday, your Team Leader needs a chance to compile the training report.
Continuing Education, Volunteering and Your Taxes— We have our own expert, Malcolm Gettman, Battalion 1 Liaison, IRS Agent, and seriously good guy. The first class is already full, if you are waiting on this one, don't. The open class is 26 March, 9am—11am down at NTC. I don't know much about this myself, which is not a good thing, but you might have qualified deductibles as a result of your volunteer work. Get the straight story from Malcolm. He knows what he is talking about. Right now I don't. Go here to sign up:
Continuing Education, Incident Command System Online Training—FEMA's Emergency Management Institute (EMI) offers a series of online self study courses for learning the Incident Command System (ICS, note, with their obsessive need for leaving no acronym untouched, it would appear that the Government is migrating ICS to the all new and better National Incident Management System, or NIMS. We'll keep you posted on this). The thinking is that pretty much all emergency personnel should be trained in the fundamentals of operating ICS, so that people from different agencies and groups can be slotted into the ICS structure as needed during a disaster. Accordingly, the following courses are now required for all San Diego CERT team members:
100b
200
700a
704
800a
You can access these courses here:
There is no signup on the CERT web site.
Yes, I said required. Here is the good news:
· You have all year to do this (although you probably want to take them all fairly close to each other and soon)
· All five courses are good for 2 CE credits if you take them going forward from now. Three courses are good for one credit.
· If you took any of the equivalent courses since January 2008, they will count toward your requirement if you can produce the certificate you received. Yu will not get credit for volunteer hours or a CE for courses you already took, but those course will help satisfy the five-course requirement .
Bottom line, you can satisfy an entire year's CE requirements online with this deal. Send certificates for completed courses to your Team Leader. You might want to accumulate all five and send them in a batch. I know that there will be questions about this one, please address them to your Team Leader. I will try to handle all of them in one batch in next week's email. And, I'll be sitting down to take my first course this weekend.
UCI Study—Researchers at the University of California, Irvine are conducting a study on disaster response, and they would like CERT team members to participate. The following is from researcher Alexander Gerard Bretaña:
The Study:
The majority of the research done on disaster response is within the context of large nonprofit organizations. More specifically, studies tend to take a closer look at the interactions between organizations. Other studies focus on volunteers within the community who collaborate with each other outside of an organizational context. What I aim to study is the role of volunteers within organizations and their communication/collaboration techniques as well as their technology use out in the field of disaster/emergency response.
Sample Questions:
Can you tell me about the last time you were out in the field with the CERT?
· Where did you go?
· What were you doing when you got there?
· How did you learn about the situation and its details and who told you? Can you tell me how your role during the situation changed, if at all? What determines whether or not your role(s) or responsibilities change during the event? Do you go into a situation knowing that your job will change based on the changing environment or do you have a set plan of what to do?
What different technologies did you use?
· In what ways was this technology helpful for the work you were doing?
· In what ways was this technology inadequate/insufficient for the work you were doing?
I've also attached a study information sheet that all interview participants are required to read before taking part in my study. It's nothing big - a 2 page summary of some protocols and details. If anyone needs to reach me, they can e-mail at this address (abretana@uci.edu) or call me at (310) 986-3339. Thanks again!
OK, I'm back, there is no obligation, if you want to help these folks out, I'm sure the research will be worthy. We have copies of the flyer, if you want to see one contact your Team Leader.
St. Patrick's Day Parade—Hopefully you all saw the email last week. Looks like we didn't get enough interest to go forward. Darn shame. I will find out where we are wit this, and post an announcement if we are doing it.
That's ALL for this week, teach me to miss one. Questions, comments, contact your Team Leader.
-Steve
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