CERT in Action!
Houston CERT Members Put Training to Good Use
Mary Ann Gonzales, who manages an apartment complex in Houston, signed up for CERT training because she wanted to know how to keep her tenants safe in the event of an emergency. “She really did her homework and was serious about the training,” Harris County-Denver Harbor CERT coordinator and instructor Andres Ortiz said. It’s a good thing she did.
In August 2008, a fire broke out in the apartment complex adjacent to Gonzales’s. Firefighters had the blaze under control by the time Gonzales and Janie Martinez, a fellow CERT graduate, arrived at the scene. The fire caused extensive damage, but nobody was injured. The two CERT members assisted the professional first responders by compiling a list of names and contact numbers for the people who were forced to evacuate the building.
Ortiz, who has worked to expand CERT in Houston’s Spanish-speaking communities through classes taught in Spanish, said another of his graduates recently responded to a two-alarm fire and set up a water station in the cold zone for responders and evacuees. “If my people can react and do the job, and do it honorably and reach the objective, it just brings me such honor to know that they learned from me and I learned from them,” Ortiz said.
For more information, please contact Andres Ortiz, gunnyortiz@comcast.net.