Food Goes
Further
QR code for
Portland Observer
Online
‘City of Roses’
Volume XLV
Number 32
Olympic Loss
Eat healthier for
cheaper with your
SNAP benefits
The Williams
sisters are
disappointed by
their loss
See page 5
See Sports, page 8
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • August 10, 2016
Established in 1970
Committed to Cultural Diversity
Argay/Parkrose NET Team Leader Michael Schilmoeller emphasizes the day’s game plan with other NET volunteers and leaders during a team exercise. NETs routinely
hold mock disaster exercises to ensure team members are fully prepared when an actual disaster strikes.
Empowered for Disasters
Residential response teams form to protect us from the big one
by C ervante P oPe
t he P ortland o bserver
Portland’s
Neighborhood
Emergency Team (NET) program
could save your life in the event of
a natural disaster. Modeled after
community emergency response
teams in Los Angeles and San
Francisco, the teams are made up
of community residents who are
trained to help their neighbors
when a major earthquake or other
national disaster occurs.
“We know that pretty consis-
tently around the world, in any
natural disaster be it an earth-
quake, tsunami or whatever, 92 to
95 percent of all the people saved
are rescued by their neighbors,
not by professional emergency
responders,” says Portland’s NET
Program Coordinator Jeremy Van
Keuren.
The NET curriculum allows
for people to volunteer as emer-
gency responders so they can
carry out search and rescue oper-
ations effectively, but also just as
importantly, safely, Van Keuren
says.
“I think where you find com-
munity resilience is a good com-
munity to be in during a disaster,”
says Van Keuren. “One thing that
data does show is that communi-
ties that have a stronger fiber tend
to bounce back from a disaster
better and quicker than commu-
nities that don’t.”
NET volunteers go through 30
hours of training in areas like di-
saster preparedness, search and
rescue, patient triage and disaster
psychology among other areas.
Basic NET training is usually but
not always instructed by mem-
bers of Portland Fire and Rescue.
The disaster preparation
comes from the prediction that
Portland will face a devastating
Cascadia Subduction Zone earth-
quake sometime in the future.
“It makes it really easy to throw
your hands up and say ‘it’s such a
big thing that I can’t do anything
about it’ and I detect that a lot
of people fall into despair or in-
difference about it. People don’t
C ontinued on P age 4