Dickey County uses the US DEPARTMENT of HOMELAND SECURITY'S -Citizen's Corps CERT program as the basic training and identification mechanism for our Emergency Operations program.
The CERT program is a great program to teach the public basic household protective and preparedness measures, first aid, basic fire fighting and is used as a vehicle to interface these volunteers with our emergency services.
The FREE program is 24 hours of training and open to everyone over 18 years of age. There is a place for everyone, regardless of your age or physical condition, to serve their community. A teen version is in the planning stages as we speak and will be offered in the schools.
Those volunteers who wish to continue are provided additional training in communications, documentation, and operations and are issued a county ID badge. This cadre of trained volunteers becomes the backbone of our Emergency Operations team. They provide logistics, documentation, resource tracking and management and shelter operations.
Our teams are organized on a community basis. Today there are currently CERT teams in Forbes ND, Fullerton ND, Ellendale ND, Trinity Bible College, Spring Creek Colony and Maple River Colony.
Each team has a community shelter with staged medical, operational, and safety equipment to take care of their communities or to deploy elsewhere in the county to support other CERT teams. The leaders are provided with a county radio to directly interface with emergency management and our responders.
CERT has participated in every drill, exercise, and emergency situation in our county as well as deploying a team to help out Brown County CERT during the flooding in early 2007.
