A small midcoast town now has a trained group of volunteers ready for emergencies from car accidents to active shooters.
The Community Emergency Response Team was the brainchild of Paul Biddle, Searsport’s Emergency Management Agency director, who thought a Federal Emergency Management Agency-certified team in Searsport could give civilians who want to help direction on how to do so.
Civilians don’t always know what to do in an emergency, he said. As a result, they can sometimes interfere with the work of first responders.
“It struck me that if those people could be trained, we could then focus what they were doing in a more structured way. The idea of CERT is about having the community turn up at emergencies, and they’ll know exactly what to do,” Biddle said.
The CERT Initiative, overseen by FEMA, trains civilian volunteers to provide assistance to public safety departments during a variety of emergencies.
As Maine’s only currently active CERT, Searsport’s public safety officials want the new team and its focus on having a hyper local impact to serve as a model for success in the rest of the state.
“There’s a lot of power in organizing at the local level. If you don’t start local, you’re not going to have a sustainable operation moving forward,” said Jedidiah Fiato, Maine’s FEMA regional preparedness liaison.
The Select Board approved the initiative in March 2022. Biddle announced the training opportunity to anyone who was interested and by December, seven Searsport residents, including five military veterans, volunteered to be a part of the team. The first cohort of volunteers finished the initial 21 hours of basic training for field work at the end of January.
Searsport’s CERT members are now able to assist first responders with car crashes, active shooters, terrorist attacks, mass power outages and storms. They’ve been trained in first aid care, emergency communications, traffic control and handling hazardous materials, among other skills.
Searsport’s CERT team isn’t the first in Maine. Such teams have existed before in Caribou, Knox County, Franklin County and Androscoggin County. However, the teams became stagnant during the pandemic because of issues with meeting in person and a lack of commitment from all team members, Fiato said.
“What tends to happen with CERT initiatives is you have a passionate, super volunteer … Once they decide to move on, it just sort of dies out because there wasn’t buy-in from all of the members and buy-in at a local level to really drive a sustained effort moving forward,” Fiato said.
Seeing that happen in Maine, Searsport Police Chief Todd Boisvert was wary about moving forward with a town CERT team.
“You need the dedication from the individuals who want to take part in the program. A lot of times when you don’t have that commitment [from everyone] … the program would struggle,” Boisvert said.
But Biddle believed it was possible to sustainably establish a committed team because of the town’s hyper local approach — which quickly got Boisvert on board.
“It has to start at the lowest common denominator, which is the town,” Biddle said. “The skills that you learn are about protecting yourself, then your family, then your neighbors, and when you feel comfortable enough, then start to protect your community.”
That is what drew the first seven volunteers to the program, who all enlisted in the program as a way to give back to the community.
“It’s exactly what I moved to Maine for — the concept of neighbors caring about each other and their well being, a lack of divisiveness and a focus on the integrity of the community,” said Nicholas Cevos, one of the CERT members who moved to Searsport in 2021.
Cevos is an Army veteran who served on active duty in Iraq who now works for the Federal Department of Veteran Affairs. Cevos wanted to find a way to bond with the community and give back beyond his day job.
“When this opportunity presented itself, it gave me that outlet for that desire to assist,” Cevos said.
With the first seven members ready to go, Biddle is preparing to start training the next four volunteers. Training is open to anyone who is interested in learning, whether or not they initially commit to joining the team.
Eventually, Biddle hopes to get to 20 members. But, even if they don’t stick around after training, Biddle knows that he’s prepared more residents to handle emergencies when faced with them.
“They could all go home tomorrow and my job is still done because the aim was that I would make them more resilient within the community if anything were to happen,” he said.
