George Rebane
[This is the submitted form of my July column in the 9jul11 Union. Its online version is available here.]
Have you thought about what you and your family will do in the face of a large scale emergency that directly impacts Nevada County? Most people hereabouts think of the Forty-Niner Fire of 1988 as an example of a large scale emergency. Wrong. A large scale emergency (LSE) is one that can result from a magnitude 9 earthquake (‘The Big One’) near the coast, a pandemic of Bird Flu or some other communicable dreaded disease, terrorists detonating a dirty nuclear device in the Bay Area, and so on.
One of the reliable ways you can tell if Nevada County is impacted by a LSE is by just picking up the phone and dialing 911. If no one answers, you got yourself a large scale emergency. The other more horrendous indicator of a such an emergency is when you hear of or witness tens of thousands of people ‘heading for the hills’.
This escape destination has been used since biblical times by people living in more populated areas. The everlasting hills are a beacon of safety, survival, and hope. But people heading for the hills don’t usually arrive with the right stuff to shelter, feed, and medicate themselves – they had other things on their minds when they left home.
West county has always planned on taking care of about 3,000 arrivals on the fairgrounds property. The planning from there becomes a bit more vague since the food in our local stores will feed county dwellers for at most three days, and during a LSE we can expect the distribution system (‘the grid’) to be down. Add to that the fact that only a small fraction of our citizens are prepared for anything beyond hunkering down during a storm for a couple of days, and you begin to see a real problem here.
In response to an LSE and lesser emergencies, Nevada County operates the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). Part of that program involves training citizen volunteers to become members of CERT – as a part of the solution instead of becoming a part of the problem. To qualify you have take three 8-hour classes that teach you all kinds of things that you would want to know anyway in order to take care of family and friends in an emergency. And during an LSE, people so trained become indispensible.
The next CERT course will be given on the Saturdays of August 13, 20, 27 at the First Baptist Church of Grass Valley across from NUHS. The course curriculum is outlined as follows –
Disaster Preparedness – Disaster Threats: Earthquake, Wildfires, etc., Hazard mitigation, Community Preparedness.
Hazardous Materials and Terrorism – Identifying Hazmat situations, Securing Work and Home, Hazmat and terrorism incidents.
Disaster Medical Part I – Health considerations for rescuer, Opening airways, stopping bleeding and controlling shock, START triage, Disaster Psychology.
Disaster Medical Part II – Minor burns, Apply splints to arms and legs, Practicing Disaster, Medical skills.
Fire Safety – Reducing Fire Hazards in the Home and Workplace, CERT Size-up, Fire Suppression
Light Search and Rescue – Conducting Search and Rescue Operations, Lifts and carries of victims
CERT Organization – CERT Organization and decision making, Disaster plans and where CERT fits in, Documentation.
Communications – Composing emergency messages, Demonstration of FRS and Ham radios.
Skills Development and Application – Extinguishing fires, Triaging and treating victims, Search and rescue, Extricating a victim, Interior search for reported missing persons.
To register for the course or to get more information, please call (530) 265-7174 or email patti.carter@co.nevada.ca.us. The course is free, but because the class size is limited to 35, pre-registration is required.
Finally, those readers, familiar with my take on what is going on in our country and our world, would not consider this column complete without a little extra warning thrown in. The US dollar is doomed; it has only one future – to be marched to the wall and shot (aka hyperinflation). And our government will attempt to do this with the least warning possible, as have all other governments who have spent themselves silly.
But in these times the markets may telegraph the end of the greenback, and then everyone will know. The result could be what happened in Germany leading up to 1923, or what is happening in Greece right now. Because there is no economy in the world that can bail out the United States, our ‘popular response’ in a multi-cultural nation may be even more extreme.
Just thought I’d throw in another type of large scale emergency that you are already betting the ranch on.
George Rebane is an entrepreneur and a retired systems scientist in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on KVMR and Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).
rebanesruminations.com 
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