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East Lake CERT in Training Exercises

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By Vivienne Green | The Suncoast News

Published: October 6, 2007

EAST LAKE, Fla. - EAST LAKE, Fla. - A plane crash, tornado, lost child. These are tragedies no one wants to experience.

The good news is there are volunteers preparing themselves for any such scenario.

In the last two months, members of East Lake Community Emergency Response Team have been working with local agencies in disaster challenges of increasing proportion and intensity.

The last CERT drill, in August, saw volunteers acting as casualties in a mock plane crash involving 13 agencies from Pinellas County.

That drill lasted three days. It was led by Lt. Mark Teolis of East Lake Fire Rescue. The fire departments of Palm Harbor, Oldsmar, Safety Harbor and Dunedin also participated.

Representatives of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, Bayflite helicopter ambulance service, Control Dispatch, Pinellas County Environmental Foundation, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Pinellas County Risk Management and Sunstar Emergency Medical Services took part as well.

"The concept was that of a commercial jet that crashed in the Brooker Creek Preserve and all the agencies had to integrate to deal with the incident," Mark Weinkrantz, the chairman of East Lake CERT, said.

Brooker Creek Preserve, which Pinellas County owns and operates, is an 8,000-plus-acre nature sanctuary in the East Lake area.

Even more recently, on Sept. 19, CERT volunteers acted out a tornado disaster scenario inside the North Pinellas YMCA.

This was a tabletop drill where, according to Weinkrantz, a tornado had damaged a large area in East Lake and "while the fire department and other first responders were occupied with other assignments it fell to the East Lake CERT to search for and treat victims in a heavily damaged shopping complex."

Randy Burr, an East Lake CERT member, developed and ran the tornado drill that required participants to recover and treat "victims" of the tornado.

"Other team members executed duties in search and rescue, fire suppression, triage, and medical care," Weinkrantz said. "Of course the 'victims' in this case were all 3-by-5-inch index cards with symptoms annotated for CERT members to process."

CERT volunteers are looking forward to their next big challenge in December.

Details still are being worked out, but the drill will involve at least six CERT groups from Pinellas County and will be held at Highlander Park, in Dunedin. Their focus will be to assist authorities in a mock, lost-child exercise.

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