A community that plans for an emergency together stays together.
With all signs pointing to an intense El Niño season and experts warning about the upcoming fire season, the importance of being prepared is more crucial than ever, and the City of Malibu responds by offering emergency preparedness workshops for families.
Sparked by growing local interest in crisis prevention, the city’s Emergency Coordinator Brad Davis, along with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, hosted its first Family Emergency Preparedness Training Workshop at Malibu City Hall on Tuesday.
Davis created the family course specifically for residents who didn’t necessarily have the 21-hour time commitment for the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training classes Davis teaches, but were interested in obtaining more information about emergency preparedness.
“CERT is for organizing teams,” Davis said. “This is not a CERT class. The team is your family. The CERT mission is to do the greatest good for the greatest number — this course is to help you take care of your family.”
The family emergency preparedness workshop included a discussion on potential disaster threats in the area, understanding fire hazards and medical emergencies, and issues of disaster psychology.
“It’s important that we understand that the first responder community is going to be overwhelmed and people are going to have to rely on each other,” Davis said. “Some of those needs are going to have to be life-saving needs.”
Davis also stressed identifying the three tenets of preparedness:
1. Have a plan. What am I going to do in any given emergency and what am I going to need in order to do that?
2. Have supplies. Water, food, shelter, first aid, extended medications and don’t forget about your pets.
3. Have a clue. Getting situational awareness. When is it going to start looking better?
In addition to the three tenets, Davis encouraged families to develop a disaster plan in case of evacuations or separations.
“We all understand that in a major emergency, it’s all going to be on us,” Davis said. “We talk about first responders and typically assume [that they] are the fire department or the police department, but, in fact, the truth is, the first responders are us. We’re the ones who are there before anyone is there. With a community of 13,000 residents and 17 firefighters — the math doesn’t really add up.”
The two-hour, six-week educational workshops can assist residents with first aid and building emergency supply kits, along with fire starting, stopping and extinguishing techniques.
“The topic of emergency preparedness and disasters can be unpleasant for some people and can push their buttons,” Davis said. “What I strive to do in all of my training courses is to make it an understanding with the room that this is a safe place to talk about all of those things … understand that you are in a safe place and feel however you feel about those things.”
For more information about the family workshop, contact Brad Davis at 310.456.2489. ext. 260.