State Volunteerism, Citizen Corps, etc.

If you catch any of the news, you know, those 7 second sound bites that constitute today's awareness and totally informed nature of the entire world around us, you realize how many people really can and do step-up when the time comes.

A variety of officials have touted it, Assembly Bill 38 (AB 38) calls for it, and we all know we are capable at some level of being prepared to help at least ourselves if not also our neighbors, family and friends in times of need - times of extreme need like wildland fires, floods, and oh my - earthquakes.

There are and will be many opportunities to become part of a self-help community initiative to come together in preparedness to mitigate the effects of disasters - before the inevitable disaster strikes.

Someone helps save, protect, feed, clothe, and tend to the injured people and damaged property - people like you and I. It feels good to be one of them!

I encourage you to look into and participate in any or as many preparedness and aid opportunities as possible - at work, within schools and churches, community classes, etc. www.fema.gov and the American Red Cross are great places to start.

It only takes a few to help many, and many more can make helping less work than beneficial.

As opportunities permit I hope to post more direct links and schedules of classes to come.

- jim

Thanks so much for posting this, Jim! I really would like to learn about the emergency preparedness classes - I've been wanting to take one.

I agree, it is important. For that reason, I decided to join the Campbell CERT group. It's a great group of people, who are passionate on helping their neighborhoods to prepare for an emergency. As I get information that will benefit my neighborhood, I distribute it. If the neighbors read it or not at least I know I tried to educate them.

I get some of the information from my daughter. She is the Disaster Manager for Contra Costa County Red Cross. They are very agressively preparing their county and I felt that all of that information would be beneficial here as well.

I would encourage everyone to look into the CERT program. It's not a difficult program. In fact, at our last exercise, there was an eight year old, along with his mother, who received his certification.

Suzanne Gibino is the new CERT Advisor for Campbell CERT, and she works for the Campbell Police Department.

I'll either have Suzanne post or I can post the next training session on Social Wave.

Jacque

Glad to see I stirred things up a bit!

One of my reasons for the initial post was to do just that... stir the pot. Calif has not had a major 'event' for many years, and when you get comfortable you forget how much a mere 20 minutes of violent shaking or 3-days of rain can affect thousands of lives - thus preparations lag - politically, economically, personally.

Keep an eye on various levels of govt. and what we need and want them to be prepared for! I'll be VERY disappointed if I see any of our officials screaming at a TV news camera to "get your a***** down here..." because we and they, at least the able and capable, were not impressed upon enough to take care of ourselves.

I'll be sure to post the next Campbell CERT class info when available.

QUOTE (K9GVF @ Mar 17 2007, 05:22 PM)

Calif has not had a major 'event' for many years, and when you get comfortable you forget how much a mere 20 minutes of violent shaking or 3-days of rain can affect thousands of lives - thus preparations lag - politically, economically, personally.

Jim, that's an excellent point. I'm glad you're reminding us about this stuff.

It would be great to make Social Wave more of a repository for information about disaster preparedness for our community, and encourage people to learn more about it. Admittedly, it's something I don't know much about, so if you and Jacque could keep us updated on a regular basis, that would be really cool.