Volunteering with local disaster response

I’ve mentioned in other posts that I volunteer with Portland NET. Folks have asked me to talk about that more, so here I’ll give an overview of the program, the activities we participate in, and how it fits into a larger disaster response context.

The Portland Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET) program trains volunteers to respond to local disasters, covering skills like medical triage and search and rescue basics. The program’s primary focus has been on preparing to respond to a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, which would overwhelm the capacity of fire departments, hospitals, and other emergency responders. This event is expected to leave Portland geographically isolated and split us down the middle due to collapsing bridges and other infrastructure.

I joined in 2017 after concluding, like many of the people in my training cohort, that the political situation was likely to impact our access to outside aid if such a disaster occurred. At the time, my neighborhood didn’t have an active team because the previous team lead (TL) had moved away. The requirements to restart the team were that five people had to attend a meeting to vote in person for a new TL. Since that seemed like something I might be able to do, I volunteered. And here we are today. 😄

To become a NET volunteer, you take the Basic NET training which is typically scheduled as three Saturdays of classroom time plus a hands-on final field exercise (FFE)¹ on a following weekend. Most of the curriculum follows FEMA’s CERT program, but we do some additional radio communications training along with it.² Once you complete your training, you’re issued a badge, safety vest, and hard hat. If there’s an active team in your neighborhood, you’ll attend meetings (usually monthly or bi-monthly). Our program coordinators at PBEM (Portland Bureau of Emergency Management) send out regular emails with training opportunities and deployment requests. Typical deployments include down power line perimeter management, volunteering at shelters during extreme cold or hot weather, and clearing storm drains before a weather event. After a major winter storm event in January 2024 the city asked us to help document storm damage. We also usually get a standby notice before a major weather event to let us know that deployments might be happening. During the response to the COVID pandemic, we worked at the EOC in a number of roles including logistics and admin support.³ We also helped staff vaccination clinics.

There’s only one situation where NETs are allowed to self-deploy without authorization from PBEM: when a major disaster presents a clear citywide emergency and we’re unable to make contact with the EOC. This is unlikely to happen outside of the Cascadia earthquake scenario.

One of the best reasons to join NET, in my opinion, is the access to free training. Aside from the topics covered in Basic NET there’s Wilderness First Aid, Mental Health First Aid, HAZMAT awareness,⁴ deescalation, crowd management, ICS (the incident command system), and damage assessment. FEMA also runs webinars⁵ to share the latest research with CERT volunteers and community organizations.

As a TL, I organize our monthly meetings and act as the team’s exercise coordinator for biannual citywide deployment exercises (CDEs). The good/bad thing about our team system is that TLs have a lot of leeway to decide how to run things, what activities to organize, etc. It’s great for someone like me who had prior organizing experience but can leave new TLs feeling a little lost. We’ve started having regular TL meetings to check in and share ideas, which I think will help a lot.

My feelings about being a part of the program have changed throughout these past eight years. I’ve always felt there was a lot of potential in what we’re doing, but most NETs are white, college educated homeowners rather than a reflection of the communities most vulnerable to disasters. There’s a desire to change this, but not a whole lot of funding for recruitment. We had our first Spanish-language training cohort only in the last year or so. Disability access follows the ADA model where people have to ask for accommodations. As a result, it’s not always clear what sorts of things can be requested. There’s also an increasing gap between the things we learn in Basic NET and the deployments we participate in as climate change causes more and more extreme weather.

In the end, I realized that I can do a lot of good as a TL who’s focused on supporting team health and longevity for a group of people who feel called to help others during emergencies. People join the program with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, which drops off over time for a number of reasons. So I try to normalize conversations about how our interest may wax and wane, encourage them to pick an area to focus on, and talk openly about the impacts of aging and disability. I also emphasize health and safety issues like preventing the spread of covid and other respiratory illnesses. In the winter the team meets over Zoom, and the rest of the time we’re outdoors.⁶

If you’re in Portland, you can get involved by going through NET basic training, becoming an ARO (amateur radio operator), or as an ATV (affiliated trained volunteer).⁷ In other parts of the US, you may have a local CERT program through your city or county. The scope of activities for CERT programs can vary a lot, depending on who’s running it and the hazards that affect your area. You can also take trainings directly from FEMA, particularly on ICS skills.⁸

Beyond that, I think there’s a real need for people to organize at whatever level they’re interested in around the issue of community resilience and ability to help each other during emergencies. In my dream world, we’d have a full continuum of disaster response from the state and federal level on down to the mutual aid groups working inside their own communities. That’s clearly not going to start from the top down, so it’s up to the rest of us to be working with our communities in a safe, thoughtful, and organized way where we can collaborate across the scope of disaster situations. NET is one way to learn the skills that can help.