Poway hosts countywide CERT drill

If a plane crashed in Poway, what would you do? If you were a member of the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), you’d know exactly how you could help, thanks to a countywide drill held at St. Michael’s Church on Saturday.

The drill simulated what would happen if a plane that had been fighting a wildfire in Escondido crashed on the fields of the church.

About 100 CERT members from Poway and San Diego County, several fire and rescue organizations and roughly 70 volunteers came out to the drill, which is generally held twice a year around the county.

The drills are intended to keep the CERT volunteers’ safety and survival skills sharp and up-to-date, said Marc Hennen, a team leader for the Poway CERT program.

CERT is a nationwide program that educates individuals about disaster preparedness and provides training in basic disaster response skills, such as fire safety, light search and rescue, team organization and disaster medical operations. San Diego County has more than 1,700 trained CERT volunteers.

All CERT members go through a training academy when they join, said Hennen, but after that it’s up to the members themselves to attend meetings and drills to keep their skills brushed up.

It also gives the members of different agencies a change to cooperate, said Hennen.

The drills are not always scenarios but sometimes just rotating stations where the members practiced their skills. The scenario of the plane crash made the drill more interesting, said Hennen, and helped the volunteers and CERT members get more involved in the drill.

The CERT members rotated through five 45-minute stations during the drill, including medical triage, cribbing (manually building support to move debris or walls off of people who are trapped), team building exercises, search and rescue and incident command structure.

The CERT members were joined by Poway High School students and members of the local Boy Scouts, who played the victims of the plane crash and helped re-set the scenarios in between rotations.

Several of the volunteer high school students said they had agreed to do the drill for community service hours. “It seemed like it would be interactive and more fun,” said Jenifer Morris.

David Chang, a Boy Scout who attends Mesa Verde Middle School, said he also volunteered for the drill for more fun community service hours.

The young volunteers played victims of the crash, and were assigned different injuries that the CERT members and other agency members had to try and properly triage. Sometimes, the volunteers had to play dead.

“(Being a victim) you have to scream out as loud as you can,” said Poway High student Marissa Boyd. “You’re trying to act as a live dummy for them to practice on.”

Poway High student Taylor Elias said her favorite part of being a pretend victim was “being dramatic” and being carried by the volunteers. Another Poway High student, Mckenzie Ho, agreed with her, saying it was fun to “make things difficult (for the CERT members) so they had to learn.”