BY CATHY HOLLAND, COMMERCIAL CIO PRESIDENT
As President of the Tualatin Commercial Citizen Involvement Organization (CCIO), I am pleased to give you an update on our progress of helping prepare our community for all emergencies but specifically for a catastrophic event.
On December 5, 2015, CCIO invited community leaders, businesses, and government planners to discuss the predicted impact of a catastrophic event such as a major earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. At that meeting, the entire CIO business and residential leadership learned that our community needed to get prepared to take care of our neighbors and ourselves if such an event took place. As most of us are now aware, first responders are expected to be overwhelmed for weeks, if not months.
Since then, the CIOs and the City of Tualatin have been supporting a multi-prong effort to get prepared:
• Prepare our home/car/work using the Red Cross “Prepare” & “Earthquake Shout Out” Programs.
• Preparing our street and immediate neighborhood using the Oregon Emergency Preparation tool called “Map Your Neighborhood” which helps neighbors build a plan for their immediate neighborhood.
• Creating a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) using the structure currently being used by our friends in Tigard. The creation includes Basic CERT training and ongoing training and drilling. Tigard has approximately 150 active CERT members. Tualatin now has 24 with full a Spring CERT class, which will hopefully add another 22 volunteers to our group.
• Communicate monthly via the “Prepper Minute” in Tualatin Life with easy, quick steps anyone can take to get ready.
• Creating downtown incident teams to help businesses, their customers, and residents of the downtown area respond to a major event.
Would you like to get more prepared? Our next basic Red Cross Prepare class is being offered in evening and daytime on April 11 and April 12 at the Juanita Pohl Center. The class is free.
To register, go to the City of Tualatin website at www.tualatinoregon.gov. Hover on the banner “Our Community” and selection the option: “Parks & Recreation”. On that page, click on the blue box titled “Register”.
If you have previously signed up for online registration with the City of Tualatin, you can go directly to “View all Spring Classes”. If not, you need to sign up by clicking on “Create a new online registration account and view all recreation programs”. Then select “View all Spring 2017 programs” and search using the key word “emergency”. If you have trouble with the website, you can also registered by emailing tualatincommercialcio@gmail.com
The class titles are:
• Emergency Preparation 101 April 11 (Evening) 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.
• Emergency Preparation 101 April 12 (Daytime) 1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
I also want to thank Michael Antonelli of Tualatin Life, all of the CIO Presidents, CIO Board Members, volunteers and the City of Tualatin for all of their support. If you want to volunteer your time, send me an email tualatincommercialcio@gmail.com.
Cathy Holland is a retired businesswoman and a 25- year resident of Tualatin. She is also is a member of board of directors of the Tualatin Community Police Foundation.
