Volunteers test their emergency response skills

Around 60 people trained to stand up when the chips are down turned out Saturday at the Palatine Park District to test their skills.

The participants in the daylong "CERT. Challenge 2009" are all volunteers in Community Emergency Response Teams from throughout the area.

Event Chairman Dennis Doyle said the challenge consisted of a series of stations at which teams of five to six volunteers received refresher instruction and competency exams.

CERT. organizations began forming in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a way to use citizen volunteers to augment police, fire and other emergency workers in dealing with disasters.

Teams from Palatine, Wauconda, Arlington Heights, Rolling Meadows, Lake in the Hills and Northrop Grumman Inc. participated in the challenge.

There were stations at which the volunteers practiced emergency first-aid and triage, communications, team building and search and rescue.

Team building instructor Neil Baltz of Palatine said CERT. groups attract people from all walks of life and the volunteers must be schooled in working together.

"They have to establish a team dynamic, figure out who the leaders are in each group," Baltz said. "And the leaders may change, depending on what the circumstances of a situation are."

In one of the drills in the exercise, team members stood inside a circle of rope and were told to fold it into a star.

"It usually takes them a while to figure out it only takes two moves to make the star," Baltz said. "But in that process, they discover who the people are who are going to take charge and give directions."

Crunchtime for the teams is the search and rescue stations, where Doyle said participants get instruction on how to properly search for injured people in a building and then get a chance to prove they were paying attention.

In a blacked-out room in the district's main building, tables, chairs and a ladder have been overturned and strewed about with other debris.

Team members are sent into the room with nothing but a flashlight for illumination, and must show they are able to negotiate the obstacles while performing a number of duties.

"The scenario is that of a room that has been hit by a tornado or other calamity," Doyle said. "The teams have to get around in there, assess the situation and be able to report what they found."

CERT. members go through 20 hours of training under guidelines established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be qualified for a team, Doyle said.

Volunteers are free to go through additional training in specific areas of their interests, he said, and people who train CERT. volunteers must take a three-day training course in Springfield.

Teams get their equipment through private donations or grants from the state or federal government, Doyle said.

And the volunteers know they have to be able to take care of themselves before they can take care of anyone else.

"I joined CERT. because I was interested in finding out how best to prepare by family to deal with a disaster," said volunteer Julie Butler of Arlington Heights.