Buddy had a strong sense for managing his own life’s emergencies. He never learned, however, to work the equipment to deal with ours.
Across the country, towns are quietly building a wide range of protections to reduce local threats from one climate threat or another.
Preventing or coping?
As we walk around a town, we can often spot climate adaptation projects, such as laying permeable pavements to reduce flooding, planting lots of shade trees, setting up portable flood walls, stockpiling sand bags for public use, and expanding town sewers - all covered in recent ClimateDog newsletters.
But climate-driven threats can’t always be countered physically. In some communities, disaster response may be considered as important as disaster prevention. In these locations, volunteers are being recruited, trained and equipped to play a part in coping with a local disaster. Neighborhood volunteers can be the first to reach survivors; they can supplement police, fire, EMT and other professional responders who may be overloaded during a disaster; and they can take on lots of lower-skill functions to free up the experts.
If there’s a major emergency event, like an earthquake, fire, or flood, the plans of some volunteer disaster response units assume the Community will be without services for days, maybe weeks. Bridges could be out, power and cell service down, first responders overwhelmed, and FEMA slow to respond. Building a trained volunteer response team may have as high a return as investing in physical protections like raising structures, installing floodwalls, clearing firebreaks or rebuilding drainage.
The volunteer teams
The American Red Cross is the first group most of us think of providing volunteer assistance in a disaster. Indeed they respond to more than 60,000 disasters every year, many of them involving single homes. And 95% of their disaster relief workers are volunteers.
As much as anything, the volunteers in a Red Cross Disaster Action Team offer a shoulder to cry on, try to meet any immediate needs for supplies, provide transport, find survivors a place for the night, and connect people to long-term recovery services.
Managing volunteers can be like herding cats. Fortunately, The Red Cross has the experience, procedures and the chain of command to help focus volunteer efforts. And they try to recruit team members who will be “comfortable with ambiguity” and “able to remain calm and patient during stressful moments.”
A Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) consists of men and women who have completed an online course plus two days of hands-on training. The program is a branch of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and I can say there’s no shortage of manuals, checklists, and other aids to learning - and remembering stuff when in action. (FEMA requires lots of forms too. Along with their knee pads, water bottle, goggles, helmet, and gloves, a CERT volunteer needs to carry a clipboard full of forms and pens.
CERT members are given the knowhow to fight small fires, canvass the neighborhood for damage and injuries, lift some heavy objects trapping or pinning survivors, conduct an initial head-to-toe assessment of medical needs, do simple first aid procedures including stopping bleeding, move a survivor safely when necessary, conduct simple search and rescue, and identify damaged structures that remain dangerous. Depending on how busy the professionals are, CERTS may be the first to reach and identify survivors needing urgent medical care.
They may also erect tents and heaters, put up cots, lay out basic medical supplies, transport survivors, direct traffic, and put up notices and direction signs around the neighborhood.
To make sure response is not hampered during an outage, many CERT volunteers operate Amateur (HAM) Radios, practicing every week among themselves. Short-range radios may also be handed out during the relief effort.
My local CERT unit stocks lots of equipment and supplies ready for use. This retrofitted container at our ‘Disaster Assistance Center’ fronts on an open space where big tents can be erected, cots with blankets set up, electric generators and heaters started up, and basic medical supplies dispensed along with tea, coffee, cider mix, and water.
Beyond training materials (and forms), however, FEMA does not provide any of the equipment or supplies. Local CERT units must find the funds to equip their own team. The money and gear can come from local fundraising, homeowners’ associations, corporate donors, and maybe the fire department and other local government and private organizations.
Is it risky? Volunteers in both the Red Cross and CERT are taught 1) to make sure their own family and property is protected before reporting for duty, and 2) to resist the urge to take personal risks during their work.
Other volunteer opportunities
A little research is likely to turn up other groups in our locality we could join to help in an emergency. Some are faith groups; others look for retirees with serious medical or fire fighting experience for instance. And some exist primarily to funnel the surge of untrained volunteers who show up during an emergency toward tasks that need almost no training. Think food service, directing neighborhood traffic, or disseminating information door-to-door when other communications are down. To find these groups, do a search locally for “emergency volunteer” “disaster volunteer” and “volunteer mobilization.”
(Oh, and if anyone’s reluctant to volunteer, there’s something else to consider. Beyond the satisfaction of being useful, volunteers get to wear really cool reflective vests, backpacks, and helmets!)
An update
Last month I pointed out the removable flood barrier along the river in Mount Vernon, WA. At this moment, two weeks later it is needed! A deep but short-lived snowfall in the Cascade Mountains above the town is filling the river with snowmelt, plus logs, branches, and other detritus that it’s lifting from the riverbanks along its path.
The town, watching NOAA’s River Forecast, saw 35 feet of flooding predicted.
The result has been a rapid transformation.
Note the debris being carried down the fast-moving river, and the wall design that will accept another three feet of panels if needed. The expectation is that the riverfront promenade will be underwater, but the river will not spill over into downtown Mount Vernon which lies down the slope to the left of these photos.