New squad members sought by CERT; Recruitment event set Saturday, Jan. 25

The Kerr County Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) is currently seeking new squad members who are willing to train and then be at-the-ready to serve their neighbors in their biggest times of need.

“If you can keep a cool, level head during an emergency situation, if you can jump into action without hesitation when you are needed and if you are ready to be trained on emergency procedures so that you can be our first ‘boots on the ground’ after a disaster, then we would like you to think about joining our team,” said Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator William B. “Dub” Thomas.

“If you are interested in joining our emergency response team or you know of someone who would be a good fit for our squad, then please consider and urge them to consider attending our upcoming recruitment event. We’ll have team leaders there to answer any questions you may have and go over CERT and what its responsibilities are,” Thomas said.

The CERT Recruitment Day event will be at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 25, in the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office Training Room on Paseo Drive in Kerrville.

The recruitment event will be followed in a month’s time by the mandatory basic training for CERT members on the weekend of Feb. 21-23. Topics to be covered in training include, among others: disaster preparedness, fire safety and utility controls, disaster medical operations, light search-and-rescue operations, CERT organization, disaster psychology, terrorism and more.

Applications and other pertinent information about Kerr County CERT are available by clicking HERE.

“Our Community Emergency Response Team plays a vital role in Kerr County,” Thomas said. “We need a few people who are willing to step up and lend a hand to citizens in a variety of ways when it absolutely matters the most.”

Whether a disaster is natural or manmade, it can cause chaos. CERT squad members are deployed in the immediate aftermath and arrive on the scene even before uniformed emergency units, he added. In less-than-ideal circumstances, we rely on the CERT team members’ ability to work under stressful scenarios and provide situation assessments and recon for emergency personnel before their agencies can respond. Later, CERT members tackle the logistics of organizing volunteer responses and maybe even the distribution of emergency food, water and other resources to citizens who find themselves negatively impacted by disasters.

Kerr County CERT meets the second Thursday of each month at the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, 400 Clearwater Paseo in Kerrville.

Those with questions about CERT or seeking more information may contact Thomas by emailing him at wthomas@co.kerr.tx.us or by calling 830-315-2430 during regular business hours.