Two clocks

A disaster has two clocks, and they do not agree. The first clock is the one on your kitchen wall: the hours after the wind, the ice, the water, the dark, when whoever is standing in the street is the response. Disaster research has been boringly consistent on this for decades. The people who pull neighbors out, who check the man with the oxygen concentrator, who move the chain-sawed tree off the only road, are ordinary and unprepared-looking and already there. Institutions are good. They are also, often, eight hours away when the road floods.

The second clock is the county's. Emergency management, fire, public health, the people who speak in Incident Command because that is the language that lets a fire engine, a public-works crew, and a volunteer group occupy the same block without running over each other. That clock starts when they can get to you. It does not start when you wish it would.

Terrarium is a bet about the first clock. This post is about not wasting the second.

What a handshake is

A street that has eaten together, that has three names on a cabinet door, that knows who has a generator and who has a nurse, is already doing the work the first clock requires. The failure mode on day three is not usually courage. It is vocabulary. A well-meaning block lead walks up to a lieutenant and says "we're the neighborhood watch, we have a list." The lieutenant hears unaffiliated volunteers, which in that profession is a second incident wearing a smile.

The handshake is smaller than a program. It is a handful of shared words so that when official systems arrive, the street is legible. Incident Commander. Staging area. Span of control. CERT. Those words are not a costume. They are how a civilian block becomes something a county can plug in instead of work around.

We need to say the next sentence without flinching, because this is a field guide and field guides that flatter you are maps to the wrong town: Terrarium is not a CERT program. Terrarium is not your county Office of Emergency Management. No federal emergency agency certifies this store, its score, or your street. The score does not feed the National Preparedness Goal and does not sit inside THIRA. We sell rain chains and we write about soup. The official systems are real, they have doctrine, and the honest relationship is: we teach the street to be ready for the first clock, and we point at the doors where the second clock is taught. No federal agency blesses this storefront or its score.

CERT, named correctly

Community Emergency Response Team is a citizen training program run locally, framed nationally on ready.gov. Basic training covers size-up, light search and rescue, fire safety, disaster medical, and team organization. It is useful. It is also bounded: CERT graduates are not firefighters, not law enforcement, and not licensed medical. Impersonating any of those is a crime and a moral failure. The class exists so that when the professionals are saturating, a trained neighbor can do the light work without becoming a patient.

If a CERT class is offered in your county, that is a better afternoon than buying another hard case. The offering on this site for CERT is a link to the national door, not a badge we print. Completing a class is something you mark as started on your household profile because it is practiced capability. Reading this post is not the class.

ICS as a language, not a hierarchy

The Incident Command System is how responders keep from inventing a new org chart in every parking lot. IS-100.C is a free Independent Study course, about two hours, no prerequisites. IS-700.B is the NIMS wrapper. A block lead who has sat through both will not run the county. They will be able to hear "who's IC?" without blinking, and they will know that showing up with twelve people and no assignment is how you get asked to wait in a lot.

That is the whole pitch. Shared language. Not a neighborhood chain of command with radio callsigns and a laminated org chart on the fridge — unless your CERT team actually has one, in which case it was issued by people whose job that is.

What to do this month

Three acts, none of which require a meeting.

First: find your county emergency management office. Search the county name plus "emergency management." Write the URL on paper. Sign up for whatever alert system they run. Wireless Emergency Alerts already reach most phones; the local one does not, and that is the one that says the shelter is the high school, not a presidential alert.

Second: if a CERT class is on the calendar, put it on yours. If it is not, you still have IS-100.C, which is free and online and will not make you insufferable if you remember it is vocabulary.

Third: tell two neighbors, in a sentence, what you are doing. "I'm taking the free ICS intro so when the county shows up I can talk to them." Watch it land as the most normal thing in the world. The first clock still belongs to soup and names. The second clock belongs to people who already have a job. The street that can shake hands with both is the one that is actually ready.