Why is your CERT team being deployed so often? My understanding is that they are only to be used for some sort of wide scale disaster where people with hands and minimal training and equipment could be useful, like an earthquake or tornado.
I work for a private organization "The Ohio Special Response Team", that is the only statewide "official" Search and Rescue Team in Ohio. Obviously, we have a FEMA team that does USAR, but they are federal. We are only tasked with ESF#9, Wilderness Search and Rescue, and are the only agency that is a part of Ohio's Emergency Response Plan. We have several units that deploy statewide under the jurisdiction of a county. In some counties, our boss is the County EMA, in other counties, it's the Sheriff.
We are deployed about 20-30 times a year for a variety of functions: typically missing persons or body recovery missions (like a drowning). We do several monthly training exercises as a private agency, and quarterly and yearly exercises that are evaluated by The State of Ohio EMA. On top of that we do regular training to maintain certifications.
I run into CERT leadership at the county level during training courses that someone else (like the state or a county) is hosting.
Where we see CERT deployed are usually in two main areas:
1). When a search operations have exhausted all available resources. This usually ends up being counterproductive because, no joke, we waste more resources looking for missing CERT members, rehabbing ill-equipped CERT members, or medically treating injured CERT members who aren't prepared to be off of the sidewalk (so to speak).
2). The area where they are really productive is on a "******* Search". I apologize for the language, but that is the official term. When we are conducting a large scale multi-agency operation, the media usually gets involved. We will purposely ask for CERT to be mobilized, send them a few "real" searchers to lead them, and then send these high visibility people to be followed by the media to conduct a search of an easy terrain, low probability area, so that real search operations can be conducted elsewhere. We still end up with a lot of tired, dehydrated, injured, good-hearted CERT volunteers who require medical attention, which eat away at logistics and RIT teams.
CERT has its place and uses, but just generally not in the field. To me, it's a lot like a volunteer firefighter that takes a 36 hour class. If you have a strong backbone of experienced leadership, those "low information volunteers" are great assets that can be strategically placed. On the other hand, if you had an entire area covered only by inexperienced volunteer firefighters who never wanted to learn any more depth to their trade, then you would have a mountain of a useless nightmare.
Most people I work with have literally thousands of hours of training. The people on the FEMA USAR teams in many cases have even more (when you realize that they have specialized engineers, doctors, etc.). CERT would be great if the leaders had a 25 year career in disaster response. However, where I'm at, the leaders (at least at some of the county levels) are just kind hearted librarians who are really good at organizing meetings.
