Let's Focus On New Delivery Systems

The need for community preparedness was never clearer than the night of the Loma Prieta earthquake. We were working in the Marina district of San Francisco, surrounded by dozens of collapse, leaning and burning buildings. People wanted to help, and they were a great help to us that night. But they had no skills and, in most cases, didn’t know what to do without some direction from us.

Shortly after the Loma Prieta earthquake, we started a CERT type program in the city. I could see in the eyes of the first class that graduated from our program that they love the class and felt empowered by the skills they had learned.

This look and feeling that I got from the graduates fueled my passion for wanting to expand the program. But it was not about making me feel good, it was about the people. When I left the fire department 7 years ago, we had trained 8,000 people in the city, we were training about 500 people every 5 weeks, and people had to wait about 6 months to get into a class.

Hind sight is always 20-20, but what did these numbers really mean?

Training 8,000 people seems like a lot, but it was less than 2½% of the population, not a real culture changer there. Training 500 people every 5 weeks is not such a grand number when you consider there were 750,000 people in the city. At that rate we could cover the whole city in about 200 years.

And what about the waiting list? Would you wait 6 months for some product?

I think we had the wrong delivery system. I think that the CERT program has the wrong delivery system. The present delivery system is costly and labor intensive. Because of this it is never going to change disaster culture, the delivery system is just too slow and cumbersome.

I think we should start focusing on new delivery systems, something that will have more of an impact on our communities.

Frank Lucier