Cary CERT Training

I signed up for Cary CERT training because it was free and more importantly sounded interesting. The group is designed to be available to provide a little bit of help in the event of a natural disaster or some other event that a member happens upon (prior to professionals arriving). The training was 3 hours of Friday evening and then 8-5 Saturday and Sunday. I’m really not a fan of waking up early on the weekend. Cary Fire Station #7 is a really nice building. Very clean and spacious. The fire fighters also provided us with decent tasting pizza for lunch. It’s not NY pizza, but has been one of the top 3 down here.

The trainers are members of the fire department or EMS. They’ve made what would easily be a very dry, boring class in to something much more entertaining. Ed has worked the phrase “with a leg lopped off” a dozen times so far.

It is a little disappointing because most of what has been taught so far is common sense, or at least it is for me. A large portion of the morning was devoted to dealing with fire safety. A few hours with the basic theme of “CERT are not fire fighters, so they shouldn’t go in to a burning building or attempt to put out any big fires”. I realize this stuff needs to be said for some people, but I have a very strong sense of self preservation.

The fun exercises we’ve done so far were:

• building a tower out of paper, 2 small pieces of cardboard, scissors and a roll of scotch tape.
• putting out a small propane fire with extinguishers.
• splinting various limbs.

For some odd reason, these all reminded me of college (without duct tape). ;)