Officials hope to be ready for quake

Joseph Dougherty

Utah State University is prepared if an earthquake or any other natural disaster hits Cache Valley.

USU police sponsor a training program that was created in California in 1985 to teach members of neighborhoods to deal with emergency situations when normal resources such as police, fire department and ambulances would not be able to respond.

The program, called Campus Emergency Response Team (CERT), has 184 people trained on USU’s campus to deal with disaster fire, disaster medical, disaster psychology and disaster search and rescue.

The teams are composed of faculty, staff and students trained for their respective buildings.

Old Main, for example, has two teams of five people who, in the event of an emergency, will perform preliminary first aid and satisfy the immediate needs of the injured before regrouping with teams from other buildings on campus, Wright said.

Anyone interested in being trained for CERT can contact Wright at 797-5800.

The training is a free, 21-hour course, taught over eight weeks at two-and-a-half hours per week and usually held once a year.

But Wright said they can be scheduled more often if enough people are interested – something he said the university needs.

“If we get 20 people who want to be trained, then we’ll schedule,” Wright said. “We do not have enough people in each building.”

CERT members are equipped with hard hats, an emergency handbook and first-aid equipment.

“We encourage people to be better prepared. We encourage 72-hour kits,” Wright said.

USU’s building code mandates that structures on campus be retrofitted during renovation.

“Newer buildings are seismically correct,” said Darrell Hart, assistant vice president for Facilities Management.

It is a slow, expensive process, but as USU grows from single-story to multiple-story buildings, the seismic design of the buildings will be upgraded, Hart said.