May 27, 2004
Some UW staff to get emergency response training
If you’re a fan of ER or Third Watch, there’s an opportunity to play a role in real life emergencies on the UW campus. This summer a group of staff members will be trained as members of the UW Campus Emergency Response Team, or CERT.
CERT is a national training program sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but it is designed for communities, not for universities. The UW is one of only three universities that either has a program or is developing one.
“The task of adapting a community module to a campus module I think is really interesting,” said Joshua Curtis, the program coordinator. “The campus is like a city so it has its own hazards and unique ways of doing things.”
This summer, the University plans to train 25 to 30 staff members to be members of the team. The training, which begins June 15, requires a three-hour commitment once a week for nine weeks. The training includes basic first aid, fire safety and light search and rescue strategies, among other things.
Curtis is a graduate student in urban planning who worked in disaster mitigation when he was in the Peace Corps. He’s coordinating the training under the supervision of Steve Charvat, the UW’s director of emergency management, but he won’t be doing all the teaching.
“We have a wealth of expertise on campus that we plan to draw from for the training,” Curtis said. “We’ll have different teachers for each of the sessions.”
Some of the training will be in the classroom, but some of it is hands-on. The class will have the opportunity, for example, to put out a real fire. And for the last session, a disaster simulation will be held in a building at Sand Point.
Assuming all goes well, this summer’s training will be just the beginning at the University. “Eventually, we’d like to have a CERT team in every building on campus,” Curtis said. He said training sessions could be held three to four times a year, perhaps on a more concentrated schedule than the one this summer.
Anyone interested in either the upcoming CERT training or future ones should contact Curtis, joshua3@u.washington.edu.
