The Office of Disaster Management with support from the Rotary Club of Dominica, the United Nations Development Programme (U.N.D.P) and the Government of Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) successfully completed its 11th C.E.R.T training which ran from January 28 to February 01, 2019.
Acting National Disaster Coordinator at the ODM, Donalson Frederick notes “The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program is an; all-risk, all-hazard training. This valuable course is designed to help individuals protect themselves, family, work colleagues, neighbours, and neighbour-hood in emergency situations. The training provides an opportunity for communities to become more self-reliant when and if disasters affect them and their communities. The CERT Program enables the development of multifunctional response teams whose members can give critical support to professional first responders, and provide immediate assistance to victims.”
The participant came from communities to include; the Kalinago, Bellevue, Portsmouth and members from Rotary club of Dominica.
The components of said training included:
- Basic Firefighting and Utility Control
- Disaster Medical Operations
- Search and Rescue
- Map Reading and Navigation
- Emergency communication and
- Disaster Management concepts for best practices.
The programme concluded with a closing ceremony where participants were commended for their hard work throughout the week. Successful participants were awarded certificates of completion, out of which ‘Best Team’ and ‘Most Outstanding Participant’ were selected. Participants were also provided with personal protective kit, equipment and tools for them to operate as part of a CERT team.
The Most Outstanding participant in
- First place prize was awarded to Joan Paul
- Second Prize went to Rotarian Delbert Paris.
- Best Team was awarded to Team Alpha.
Special mention must also be made of some of the top performers on the training
- Rotarian Desrie Elwin
- Haynie Attidore
- Monelle Alexis
The Ministry of Environment, Climate Resilient, Disaster Management and Urban Renewal and the Office of Disaster Management takes this opportunity to extent special thanks to the sponsors of the program, Instructors, Facilitators (Mr Cecil Shillingford and Ms Cludine Roberts) supervisors, staff of O.D.M, the Ministry of Heath, the Dominica Fire and Ambulance Services, the Commonwealth of Dominica Police Force and the participants who made this training a success.
