Our preparedness committee continues with our Second Sunday radio check-ins. On January 8 fifty two of our volunteers participated. We start with our block captains reporting to their area coordinators. The coordinators then check in with our communications lead Larry Kirkpatrick, who in turn does a check-in with all of our ham radio operators.
This last week we got back on schedule with our first Thursday of the month committee meetings.  This is an open meeting. All of the volunteers in the preparedness program are invited.

At our meeting on February 2 we discussed the exercises we did with the City’s CERT leadership team last fall and specifically the work most of us need to do to improve the accuracy and brevity of our messaging. We agreed to work on this as well as the use of ICS reporting forms during our next exercise.

We’ve committed to doing two exercises with our volunteers each year. The CERT leadership team has consistently organized an exercise in the fall. We have done our neighborhood exercises in the spring to early summer. We’re planning an exercise for late May this year. We’ll incorporate our emergency supplies cached around the neighborhood into this exercise. We want to include more SE neighbors in this exercise and are exploring how best to invite them. We’ll mention it in this upcoming newsletter and depending on access to SEN outreach and education funding we’ll print up some posters for the event.