A team of five Issaquah community volunteers, Darci Waltew, Karen McManus, Denise Smith, Benjamin Pfund, and Krish Rengasamy, won first place in the augural Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Olympics held in Carnation on Saturday.

Extinguishing fires and extracting injured or trapped people were just some of the skills that CERT members practiced at the Tolt River John Macdonald Park, in an event designed to test and reinforce the skills participants had learned in CERT courses.

The purpose of CERT programs is to educate community members about how they can prepare and respond to disasters and hazards in their neighborhoods, and to train local teams in basic disaster response.

Sammamish Citizen Corps Director of Public Relations, Jan Bishop, said this was the first year, of what she hoped would be an annual event involving volunteer teams from Sammamish, Issaquah, Carnation, Redmond, North Bend, Kirkland, Maple Valley and Snoqualmie.

“They’ve been trained already, this is a chance to remember individual skills and work as teams.” she said.

With the support of Eastside Fire & Rescue, the American Red Cross, Bill Merritt and Merit Emergency, and PrepareSmart, CERT teams dealt with a variety of situations their previous training prepared them to handle. The stations included search and rescue, cribbing and extraction, first aid, fire extinguishing, and communication.

“Different cities do their own drills and what to focus on. This covers everything,” Bishop said.

Maple Valley CERT Battalion Chief Paul Bokor came ready to compete.

“This year it’s a competition between the teams for points based on time, accuracy and completion of all the stations,” Bokor said.

This year, Team B, made up of Issaquah Citizen Corps members Walten, McManus, Smith, Pfund, and Rengasam, earned first place with a total of 308 points.

“Sometimes you only get to do one or two things – here we got to practice everything,” McManus said.

“It was very helpful. We learned a lot,” Rengasamy said.

All five plan to participate again next year.

CERT members were not the only ones practicing their skills at the drill. Timothy Doyle from the Office of Emeregency Management and AmeriCorps

VISTA volunteer Tony Calero practiced implementing Salamander Technology, a system that creates identification badges for volunteers and keeps track of them in the field.

“It only takes 10 minutes to set up and we’re ready to leave from the office at a moment’s notice,” Calero said. “We can do 3 badges in a minute if everyone’s ready with their IDs out.”

The system is portable and can be easily taken to a disaster area.

“In a big emergency, the system can run off a battery pack, or I could pull up my car and run it out of there,” Doyle said.

The drill is educational for both the participants and the judges, and the results will be used to structure CERT training in the future.

Jan Bromberg, who originally came up with the concept of the CERT Olympics, was one of the judges at the event.

“The drill shows us where there are weaknesses, it points out holes where there are areas to be improved,” Bromberg said. “Communications was the single most important area to be improved.”

Robin Friedman, King County Director of Emergency Management, was impressed with what he saw.

“This is a great event,” Friedman said. “The smaller exercises can be better because everyone gets a chance to do everything, first aid skills, fire extinguishing, they can demonstrate the knowledge that they learned in the course. [CERT] is a tremendous resource. It makes me confidant that our areas can take care of themselves.”

Kent T. Kiernan, President of Sammamish Citizen Corp., already has plans for next year’s event.

“Going forward we’ll take what we learned and work to see what we can do better,” Kiernan said. “I’d like to get more teams here, and have more people getting refresher training.”

For more information about CERT teams in your area, visit www.citizencorps.gov/cert