Kathy Brasch and Jon Bromberg stand in front of Com80. For the past several years, the annual Citizen Corps Expo has been held at the Washington State Fire Academy in North Bend.

An impressive facility, this site was the training ground for nearly two hundred volunteers from Citizen Corps, Medical Reserve Corps and Ham radio operators on the last Saturday in August. Volunteers from all over the region gathered to test their disaster response skills in a hands-on exercise involving an earthquake scenario.

According to some event information, the day was an opportunity for volunteers to “work together in a disaster scenario to practice and advance their skills.”

Local Citizen Corps volunteers, Kathy and Rowland Brasch and Helen Duffy, participated.

“There were staged car accidents and fires that teams were sent out to handle,” said Kathy Brasch. Teams also practiced what to do with hazardous materials.

She explained that because of the number of participants, this year’s expo was divided into four major groups and twelve teams. Groups rotated through the event to make sure everyone had an opportunity to role play.

Jon Bromberg and Steve Van Wombeck, service support volunteers from the Sammamish Citizen Corps, manned ‘Com80,’ a communications vehicle donated by Eastside Fire & Rescue.

“It is important to be clear,” said Bromberg. “We are not volunteer firefighters or EMTs. We are volunteer communication specialists and Ham radio operators.”

They transformed the donated truck into a mobile field communi cat ions unit. Bromberg did all of the radio programming work and said it was a state of the art system with capabilities such as email over radio and global position tracking.

Bromberg and Van Wombeck provided information about the capabilities of Com80 and Ham radio, which provides backup communications in the event of a ‘catastrophic failure of all other systems.’ “Thisis our first time at the state-sponsored expo and we need the chance to get out and practice… to make sure things work so that we can be better prepared,” he said.

For Carnation resident, Helen Duffy, this was her second year at the expo. Duffy chairs the Carnation Duvall CERT Program and the Neighborhood Watch Program.

“I’m impressed with the level of participation and the simulations – it’s like the real thing,” she commented. The realness of the drill made the exercise more of a learning experience and a confidence builder.

Duffy strongly urges others to get involved. In addition to being a critical survival tool in the event of an emergency or a disaster, the training was also “a great way to see other groups, increase training and work as a team.”

Thenext local training opportunity will begin on September 29 and run until November 15. This training series will be held on Wednesdays during that time. Most meetings will occur at the Duvall Fire Station with the exception of a couple of meetings to be held at the Carnation Fire Station. The course is available to people ages 16 and up and requires registration and a $35 fee. Participants will receive training, materials and equipment.

For more information and to register for the course, visit www.carnationduvallcitizencorps. org.