The Return of CERT Training for Disaster Response
Training volunteers in the skills needed for emergency response
The fires in L.A. in January are still fresh in memory. The earthquake in Myanmar is also a reminder of the devastation caused by natural disasters. Floods, tornados, high winds — how prepared are we as a community for the unexpected? This article explains why the CERT program, which was discontinued years ago in Sebastopol and most of Sonoma County, is coming back. (Warning: this is an acronym-heavy zone.)
What is CERT?
CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Team, a program that trains volunteers in basic disaster response skills, such as:
Fire safety
Light search and rescue
Team organization
Disaster medical operations
CERT volunteers can play an important role in a disaster when first responders are not available and provide assistance even once they arrive. The original program grew out of the Los Angeles Fire Department in 1985 and became a national program in 1993, growing to all 50 states. It is run out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency that Trump is threatening to scale back.
CERT in Sonoma County
Mayor Stephen Zollman of Sebastopol received CERT training through the Guerneville Fire Department. He did it so he could help his partner or his neighbors in an emergency.
“I still have the binder of material I got from the three-day training,” he said.
When he moved to Sebastopol, he was surprised to find that there wasn’t an active CERT program. Zollman allowed his certification to lapse, but he continued to believe that Sebastopol should have a CERT program. He noted that when the city council surveyed citizens about their priorities as part of research for the sales tax increase, emergency preparedness polled near the top.
Many fire departments that once administered CERT programs dropped them some years ago. Zollman said he thought there were two factors: one was getting enough volunteers to go through the training; but the second was an incident in Petaluma that made fire departments concerned about the risk and liability of using CERT volunteers. The notable exception is North Sonoma County CERT, which operates out of the Cloverdale Fire Department.
Nancy Brown is Community Preparedness Program Manager in the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) in Sonoma County. Brown has a Ph.D. in Emergency Management that she obtained in New Zealand, and before that, she was the Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for the hotels at the Disneyland Resort.
In March, Zollman attended a meeting in Santa Rosa with Brown to learn more about CERT. Brown explained that she was hired by the Board of Supervisors in 2019 to re-introduce CERT in Sonoma County. One of her first steps was to organize a meeting with a number of local fire departments, but it didn’t go so well.
“(The fire chiefs) present felt they did not have additional bandwidth and financial capacity to start a new volunteer program like CERT,” she said.
Brown did not take “no” for an answer. She decided to spin up CERT as a county-wide program to offer CERT training and manage CERT volunteers. She applied for grants that would pay for training and the ongoing administration of the program. Her team would produce training programs and keep a roster of active CERT volunteers. With a grant, Nancy was able to hire Deisy Vargas as the coordinator of the SoCo CERT Program. Deisy is a CERT Trainer who came from Santa Rosa Fire, where she worked with their Emergency Management in community outreach.
“We—the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) at the County—have the bandwidth and funding to start up and grow this program,” said Brown. “With the support of our first responders, we expect for CERT to become a truly special volunteer corps for Sonoma County that will make a real difference in our capacity to help the community.”
In the fall of 2024, Brown’s office offered their first CERT training in Petaluma and 20 people participated. A group of Sonoma Valley community members completed CERT training in Spanish on March 29. Three more CERT training sessions in English and one more in Spanish will be offered this year. The next one (in English) in Santa Rosa takes place on three Saturdays in May. (Register here or see the flyer at the end of the article).
At the meeting, Zollman was delighted to hear that Nancy and Deisy were building a county-wide CERT program that would benefit Sebastopol and West County residents. At Tuesday’s April 1 City Council meeting to establish priorities (see Sebastopol Times article on goal setting), the city council unanimously approved emergency preparedness as a Public Safety priority. When Zollman introduced the idea of bringing back CERT in Sebastopol, there were some hems and haws. When he told them that bringing back CERT would not incur any costs to the city of Sebastopol, the council unanimously approved it.
CERT members in Sebastopol
Like Zollman, Mary Dandridge had already received her CERT training before she moved to Sebastopol in 2017 from Boulder Creek (Santa Cruz County).
“I was already an active member with Boulder Creek CERT (Santa Cruz County) for about 5 years,” said Dandridge. “When I searched for a local CERT group in Sebastopol, I found out that there wasn’t one.”
She was told that there was a CERT program in Cloverdale, run by Geoff Peters. “I called Geoff, and he said I could join his group after he talked to my CERT leader in Boulder Creek to make sure I was an active member.” She participated in a mock disaster test with victims made-up with blood. “We had to do search and rescue in an earthquake-affected building, triage the injuries and apply first aid to those affected. I passed the test, and I now have a Northern Sonoma County CERT badge.”
Long-time Sebastopol resident Kevin Dwan plans to take the May CERT training, although he has been trained before. “I've had lifeguard training, CPR and AED training, and Army first-aid training,” said Dwan. “But the first time I took the CERT training years ago, I learned things that no other training had given me. Things like dealing with electrocution victims and treating spinal injuries correctly.”
“The CERT training also refreshed standard techniques that I only half-remembered—like clearing the airway and positioning a victim's head, the tempo for doing chest compression, the correct use of tourniquets, treating shock.” Dwan said that the training requires a commitment of time. “It isn’t for everyone,” he said. “But the training is actually fun!”
Rodney Helvey remembers taking a CERT training program in Sebastopol around 2015 when Bill Braga was the Fire Chief. In 2018, Braga brought on Skip Jirrells as a part-time Public Safety Outreach Coordinator to assist him with CERT programs. Helvey still had the email introducing the new position for Jirrells. Braga wrote: “Skip brings with him over 20 years of experience in the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) environment. Skip was a founding father of our Sebastopol CERT Program” and also mentioned his involvement in Map Your Neighborhood (MYN).
The Origins OF MYN
For many years, the implementation of MYN began alongside the existing CERT Program in Sebastopol. Jirrels said that they had trouble getting enough people to take CERT training.
“The CERT Board, working with the Sebastopol Fire Department, had been reviewing neighborhood programs to try and expand our impact beyond just those who were willing to be trained to assist first responders,” said Jirrels. “The Map Your Neighborhood (MYN) program fit the need for more general education about preparedness.”
MYN was developed in Washington State, and the program received a FEMA grant, which helped spread it across the country. Jirrels thinks that the first MYN training classes started in early 2010 in Sebastopol.
Jirrels said the liability issue was the main issue that caused fire departments to drop CERT programs.
“Sebastopol was one of the last programs to stop offering training,” he said.
After support for CERT ended, Jirrels focused on MYN, and many of its early leaders such as Stan Green and Janie Frigault were all CERT-trained. (Stan and Janie have recently stepped away from the group but Rodney, Mary and Kevin are still involved.) Jirrels changed the meaning of the acronym MYN from “Map Your Neighborhood” to “Meet Your Neighbors.” The group holds monthly meetings for neighborhood leaders and organizes a monthly radio check-in. (See SebastopolReady.org for details.)
“CERT training can be rigorous and a bit too much for some,” said Jirrels. “That is why we chose to back away from training individuals to help first responders and instead to provide more education on how to stay and help each other.”
Last year, the Sebastopol City Council decided it could not afford to continue funding the MYN program, and the remaining dollars for the program in the budget of 24-25 were turned over to the Gravenstein Health Action Coalition (GHAC), a nonprofit that became the new host for the program. After July 1, 2025, MYN will receive no funding from the city of Sebastopol. Zollman hopes it is temporary and that as the city’s finances improve, it can support the program again.
The new, standalone MYN is still in the process of getting organized under Jirrels and GHAC. The consolidation of the Sebastopol Fire Department with Gold Ridge has also added some uncertainty about the linkages between community-based response and the first responders at the local police and fire departments.
CERT and MYN
Brown sees “a symbiotic relationship” between CERT and groups like MYN or COPE, which is found elsewhere in Sonoma County.
“If local preparedness groups all had a few CERT-trained team members, this would increase their capacity to take care of each other when first responders were not available.”
Jirrells agrees. “CERT-trained person(s) skills would definitely be included, especially when asking the first of the three main questions that (MYN) Program asks.” They are:
Who knows what?
Who has what?
Who needs what?
“If every neighborhood can have one CERT-trained person to guide others,” said Kevin Dwan, ”it will make a tremendous difference when neighborhoods are on their own, and emergency services are overwhelmed.”
Brown agrees. “CERT training basically takes the neighborhood capacity level up a couple of notches, which could make all the difference in a major incident, like an earthquake.”
“A big mistake in the previous iteration of CERT,” said Jirrells, “was that it did not continue offering the necessary follow-up training.” He believes it depended too much on the efforts of individual fire departments. “First responders had no experience working with the CERT folks to know who and what they could rely on,” he said. “In areas where CERT has proven effective, the follow-up training and direct interactions between first responders and CERT folks are prioritized. That's where Nancy's effort may be able to make a big difference.”
Through Brown’s office, CERT volunteers are Sonoma County volunteers, and they will be a resource that can be deployed anywhere there’s an emergency in the county.
Zollman believes that both CERT and MYN are needed. “I’m a co-leader of my neighborhood MYN group,” he said. He believes that CERT volunteers will bring additional knowledge and experience to improve disaster response, even in areas outside Sebastopol. “We really have to be prepared to help anyone West of 101,” he added. The mayor plans to take the CERT training classes offered in May.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to download the pdf. Downloaded several apps suggested in the process, and still could not download the pdf.
I don’t know if it’s my incompetence or a glitch in the system
Skip Jirrels comment, “In areas where CERT has proven effective, the follow-up training and direct interactions between first responders and CERT folks are prioritized.” corresponds directly with my experience in Sacramento’s CERT program.
CERT’s training is based on the team concept. As some have commented in the article, it would be great to have a CERT team member in every neighborhood, just as it would having a firefighter and an ER doctor. But, just as with firefighters and ER docs, the real effectiveness of CERT comes from working together as a team, ideally under the leadership of public safety professionals.
Hats off to Geoff Peters for building the relationship with Chief Turberville of the Northern Sonoma County Fire Protection District.
For CERT to be effective elsewhere in the County, I sincerely hope that the effort spinning up at the DEM follows suit by fostering direct and close relationships with fire departments and districts in Sonoma County.