In San Francisco, NERT is Neighborhood Emergency Response Team.
Visit
http://www.sfgov.org/sffdnert to get more information on upcoming class schedules.
To sign up for a class, call Lt. Erica Arteseros at 415-970-2022.
This video gives a quick introduction to why NERT is important, then gives an outline of what you will be learning during the six classes.
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The Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training was started in 1990. The citizens of the Marina district came to the San Francisco Fire Department and said "Can you teach us a program to survive on our own for at least three days?"
There is a 62% chance or probability that we are going to have a 6.7 or greater earthquake. What would happen if we had an 8.3 on the San Andreas or a 6.7 on the Hayward fault? 71 fires and 40 major rescue operations. Loma Prieta- we had four rescue operations. There were just 34 structure fires. We would need 273 engines to handle this. We have 41. You're going to be on your own and we better be all prepared.
So what we're going to do now is we're going to go over an overview of the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training program.
Part of this program is training you to make those decisions that are going to save lives. In this situation, this person carrying that pail of water is not going to put out the fire. Next week, you will be learning about basic fire suppression. How many people have used a fire extinguisher?
Maybe 10% of you? By the end of the sixth week, you will actually be putting out a fire with an extinguisher. Fire extinguishers are around in practically every home and apartment building. You should learn how to use it. You don't want to wait to learn how to use an extinguisher until there's a big fire in front of you.
Next week, they will also go over all the utilities you have in your home or in your apartment building. Which is: When you would turn off your natural gas and why, when you would turn off your electricity and why, and also water.
Hazardous materials will also be talked about next week. How many people have hazardous materials in their homes? I only see about 35 or 40% of you. Well, you're going to find out that all of you have hazardous materials in your home.
The third week, we're going to tell you about disaster medicine. When we tell you that this class is about "doing the most good for the most people," that's you, you, you and you going into a room, spending 30 to 45 seconds maximum on one person and doing three life-saving techniques.
So by the fourth week, you've gone through the utility control and gone through the disaster medicine. Now we want to teach you, as search and rescuers, how to keep yourself safe by identifying buildings that are safe to go into and not safe to go into. Also in class four, this is very important- sometimes objects are too heavy for you to lift off of a body. We're going to teach you a method called cribbing which will use a fulcrum, a lever and anything you have- whether its nicely cut wood, books, cement blocks- so that you can use this technique so that a few people can lift very heavy objects off of somebody that needs to be rescued.
By week number five, now that we told you the basics of what you need to do when you go out and do a search and rescue, now you have to have a plan. Every program needs to have a plan. We can't just say, "Here are your skills; go for it!"
Class number six, which is always the funnest class, after we do a half hour final exam, we're going to split you up into teams. Looks like it will be about 10 people each. You'll be putting out fires, going into a very dark room and doing an interior search. You're going to be treating people with injuries on them. You'll be doing cribbing- lifting a heavy object off of an Annie doll. You'll also be getting your ID. You'll also be learning about going out and learning about turning off utilities as well. So this one is really the hands on portion. We're building you up to the hands on scenario.
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