Waiting for Instructions: The CERT Paradox

Just as our donation messaging can discourage helpful action, our volunteer doctrine may be having a chilling effect on community response. Not because people don’t want to help or are incapable of helping, but because we have told them, explicitly and repeatedly, to wait.

The Contradiction in CERT Training

After I resigned from FEMA, I found myself adrift without on-call schedules and deployments. So I signed up for my county’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program.

The training was excellent and I learned valuable skills that all my years of disaster work hadn’t taught me. But I was struck by how often it emphasized waiting for direction. The old Do Not Self-Deploy chestnut was woven throughout.

It painted a picture of a disaster in which first responders would be so overwhelmed they’d need volunteers, yet structured enough to manage those volunteers with staging areas and assignments. As you can imagine, the team I trained with had never been called to an actual disaster, though they’d participated in plenty of simulated ones and special events to be prepared for one. The instructors and team members were excellent, and I found myself thinking about all the times it would have been valuable to have this highly engaged group working alongside us at the disasters I’ve been on.

Yet over the last 10 to 15 years, we’ve increasingly pushed back against regular people joining disaster response. This runs counter to many other parts of American culture, which increasingly encourages civilians to step in when circumstances are dire. CERT is a great example of where this contradiction is institutionalized in federally funded volunteer disaster training.

Part of this shift came from the post-9/11 homeland security era. Security protocols that made sense for terrorism response – credentialing requirements, information restrictions, clear lines of authority – began to be applied to all-hazards disaster response. The line between “credentialed personnel” and everyone else became starker. Regular people with training became volunteers who needed oversight rather than responders who could act.

The FEMA CERT Basic Training course (P-2057) illuminates that fundamental tension. It states that “CERTs respond immediately after a disaster when response resources are overwhelmed or delayed.” That’s the entire premise.

But it also says “CERTs assist emergency response personnel when requested in accordance with standard operating procedures developed by the sponsoring agency.”

Respond immediately when systems are overwhelmed. But also wait to be requested and follow procedures.

The organizational chart shows CERT teams reporting to a “Government Agency Liaison.” The training distinguishes between acting as an individual and acting as a CERT volunteer. When you put on the green CERT vest, you represent the sponsoring agency and must follow their rules in ways you wouldn’t if you were just an individual with training going out to help.

The best line from the training sums up this contradiction: “Do not put yourself at risk, but save lives if you can.”

There’s one place where the training grants autonomy, almost unintentionally. The ICS section explains that the first CERT member on scene becomes the Team Leader and may take on command roles until fire or law enforcement arrives. For those familiar with ICS, that means the first CERT member on scene is, by definition, the incident commander until command can be transferred. That’s a basic tenet of ICS that makes it so successful for on-scene command and control. The first one on scene can begin to act without waiting for someone in charge to arrive. This is one of the main reasons ICS was mandated by federal law for all jurisdictions after 9/11.

That’s significant operational authority. But it assumes those systems will arrive. That communication will be possible. That transition will happen.

CERT exists because disasters overwhelm formal systems. Yet the training assumes the system will be intact enough to issue instructions while degraded enough to need volunteers.

This is the kind of paradox we so often seem to be straddling in our current disaster communications: come when we call, and only when we call, even if we aren’t able to call.

We Trust People Everywhere Else

In many other contexts, our culture explicitly expects and trains civilians to step in when systems fail.

We teach CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and Stop the Bleed techniques in hours. We tell people to push hard enough on a stranger’s chest that they might break ribs, to apply tourniquets, and pack wounds. These are invasive, potentially harmful interventions based on just a couple hours of training.

And we’re expanding this approach. We’ve distributed naloxone (Narcan) to civilians and told them to administer it during overdoses. We’re trusting untrained people with pharmaceutical intervention because timing matters more than perfect technique. The opioid crisis taught us that waiting means people die.

We changed active shooter guidance to include “fight,” acknowledging that waiting is sometimes more dangerous than acting.

These aren’t risk-free activities. But we’ve decided that in these contexts, the risk of inaction outweighs the risk to the helper. We accept, as a society, that some helpers may be hurt because without them, far more people will die. The helpers understand that risk and still choose to act. We’ve made that calculation in other public safety contexts. Why not in disasters?

Across public safety, we’ve accepted a hard truth: systems don’t always work, help doesn’t always arrive quickly, and empowering people to act saves lives. These are all examples of actions we expect people to take in emergencies with little to no training.

Yet in disaster response, one of the main forms of volunteer community responders trained by the government – people who spend seven to eight weeks training with a formal exercise evaluation – we tell them to wait for instructions.

When the System Cannot Respond

There’s an assumption that disasters where 911 goes down and formal response can’t reach everyone are rare edge cases. But look at the recent record:

Hurricane Katrina. The Joplin tornado. Superstorm Sandy. Hurricane Harvey. Hurricane Maria. Hurricane Michael. The Camp Fire in Paradise. Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina.

In every one of these disasters, there were communities where roads were impassable, communications were down, and 911 systems were overwhelmed or non-functional. In some cases, for days or weeks. And in many of these disasters – particularly Maria, Katrina, and Helene – deaths occurred in the days and weeks after the initial impact because help couldn’t reach isolated communities fast enough.

This isn’t a theoretical scenario. It’s the defining characteristic of major disasters.

During Hurricane Helene, there were tremendous stories of people hiking up mountains to isolated areas to check on family and neighbors, clear debris for first responders, rescue family members, and bring supplies to cut-off communities.

People didn’t wait because no guidance could reach them. And because people were dying.

In every one of these disasters, there are stories of regular people stepping up to save lives. Neighbors pulling neighbors from rubble in Joplin. People providing first aid along evacuation routes in the Camp Fire. Communities organizing themselves to deliver critical supplies in Maria. The Cajun Navy rescuing people in Harvey. This pattern repeats across every major disaster.

This is not a failure of emergency management. It’s the reality of disasters. The scale overwhelms the system. That’s what makes it a disaster rather than an emergency.

But here’s the critical distinction: in a single building collapse, volunteers showing up unannounced and unincorporated may create problems. Resources are adequate, command structures are functioning, and additional people increase risk without adding value. The professionals are much more capable of responding safely and effectively in an emergency situation.

In a disaster where roads are impassable and 911 is down, that same volunteer helping a neighbor may be the only response available.

The challenge is helping people understand the difference. When can formal systems handle it, and when must communities act on their own? This connects back to the donations question: we need nuanced messaging that tells people when government response is degraded and they need to step up.

Good Samaritan laws exist in every state because we’ve decided that encouraging people to help in emergencies is worth protecting them from liability. If we trust those laws to protect someone giving CPR to a stranger, why do we assume they’re insufficient for someone with 20+ hours of CERT training helping their neighbor in a disaster?

The Lesson We Half Learned

CERT training often references the 1985 Mexico City earthquake as a cautionary tale. The earthquake killed at least 10,000 people. In the first 24 to 36 hours, neighbors and ordinary residents pulled thousands of people from collapsed buildings. Many were injured in the process.

The training focuses on those injuries as evidence that untrained people shouldn’t attempt rescue. But the alternative wasn’t organized rescue teams swooping in. The alternative was those people dying in the rubble waiting for help that couldn’t reach them fast enough.

The lesson of Mexico City was never that people should wait for professional helpers. It was that regular people will help, and systems should be designed with that reality in mind. We should give them training to help people with less likelihood of hurting themselves.

Questions Worth Asking

Are we treating communities as partners or as dependents? When we train people extensively and then tell them to wait for instructions that may never come, are we preparing them for the disasters we actually experience?

What would CERT training look like if it assumed no instructions were coming? How do we help people distinguish between when formal systems can respond effectively and when community action is essential?

The current reality is that CERT programs are chronically underfunded. It’s hard to tell whether there is meaningful federal program support and funding anymore. In my county, generally considered on the wealthier side, the program nearly got cut from the last budget. If we position communities as auxiliaries to formal systems rather than as primary responders in their neighborhoods, it becomes harder to justify the investment. The decline in support for CERT may signal a retreat from the idea that disasters require broad-based community capability.

If disasters are fundamentally local, and if community action is inevitable and necessary, what would it mean to design systems that expect independent action rather than discourage it?

This tension between control and partnership shows up again and again, even in the organizations that have been doing this for over a hundred years. More on that next time.