Mira Mesa CERT Newsletter

Good morning, here is the news:

Team Meeting—This Thursday, 9 August 2012, 6:00-7:00pm at the Senior Center.  Weather the way it is, we might be enjoying the evening outside, but I don't want to move it to the rally point at this late date, we'll lose some people. Our main topic will be preparation for the coming fire season.  At least one veteran of the 2007 deployment will be there to share experiences.  We'll discuss putting together a three-day Go-bag, essential for any CERT, and the differences from our perspective as CERT between a progressive disaster and sudden catastrophe.  I hope to see you all there.

Telephone Tree Volunteers—We're still looking for one more volunteer to help us during a callout in alerting our Team.   This isn't a big deal, you can do it from your cell telephone wherever you happen to be.  Basically you will get a short message from me or Jennifer, or someone above us in our chain of command.  You will need to relay that message to about eight people on your Team, then follow those same instructions yourself.  Simple, but critical.  If you can do this for us, please drop me a note.

Street Fair Signup—A lot of our new graduates first met up with us at the Mira Mesa Street Fair.  This year the Fair will be held on Saturday, 15 September.   The hours are usually 10-5, with the bulk of the crowd showing up mid-day or a little after.  They'll have heavy earth-moving equipment, police SWAT tanks, bomb-sniffing robots, this isn't your usual Street Fair.  Thos of you who helped out last year and remember the great folks from the Mira Mesa High School Air Force ROTC program will be glad to know that we've already hooked up with them, and they will be sending their usual enthusiastic crew down to work with us.  This year we'll do the log-roll/litter exercise we did with them last year, and I think we will show them some basic rescue carries they can practice with each other (the Dummy can take a break).  We might get them dressed up in our practice PPE, they might as well suffer along with.  We will need help in staffing our booth and trailer, and we'll need a LOT of help with some of our demos.  Depending on how many people we get, we'll do  cribbing practice on Dummy in the street in front of our booth.  EVERYONE who wants to get in some cribbing practice should be able to do so.  Last year we only had enough people to do the cribbing in the middle of the day, but we discovered an interesting fact; a good cribbing exercise will draw a crowd away from bomb-sniffing robots and tanks.  So we want to do it more.  And we need your help.  Shifts are usually two hours, but we'll work with you on that.  Drop me a note and let me know if you prefer morning or evening.  If you have a particular CERT skill you want to practice, let me know that too, we'll try to set something up.  I really hope to see everyone there this is going away our best recruiting opportunity of the year in Mira Mesa.  We need to grow as a Team, and we need your help to do it.  Join us.

All for this week.  Battalion News tomorrow I think.  Questions, comments, you know how to find me.

-Steve