North San Luis Obispo County CERT Gets Hosed

This morning the North San Luis Obispo County CERT assembled at the Templeton Fire Station for a Templeton Fire Department-sponsored hose-training drill at the training grounds nearby. This was done with memories seared into many minds of images of civilians wearing only shorts, T-shirts, and tennis shoes helping San Francisco firefighters haul hoses and fight the conflagration of just one block of the Marina District in the 1989 M6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

Interim Templeton Fire Chief Keith Aggson formerly of Atascadero Fire Department (which department is our patron agency) was the force behind this event even happening and he is to be commended for his initiative in this matter and his underlying vision of how useful an asset CERT can be to local departments which can't be said of all of them unfortunately and I shall leave it at that.

The drill started with the team being broken up into two parts and later those parts were further divided in half. Each group or grouplet watched the experts manipulate the hoses and hook them up and deploy them and then break them down. We as CERT members then imitated what they did and hopefully learned enough that we will retain that knowledge when the inevitable disaster strikes. At the end of the drill we watched the pros fight some small practice fires and then we as CERT members once again imitated the experts and hopefully will remember enough of this to be useful when the time comes. 

What follows is the story of our drill in photographs, all of which are shown in the order they were captured.

All photos by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).