Champaign kicked off its spring 2010 round of Community Emergency Response Team, or CERT, training Friday.

The program, which has run for the past five years every fall and spring, consists of a series of five classes that train local citizens to assess and tackle disastrous situations in their community, said Susan Wyatt, secretary for the Champaign Fire Department.

“CERT is a grassroots movement that involves everyone in making the community safer,” Wyatt said. “People attending the class will be taught how to prepare for disasters and emergencies before they happen.”

Wyatt said such preparations include how to reduce fire hazards at work and home, how to extinguish small fires, how to conduct a search and rescue, how to set up medical treatment areas, and how to apply basic medical treatment techniques.

Students of CERT must attend all five training sessions to be certified.

The certification can be used to participate in other volunteering programs and to serve on an actual response team, said Tim Murray, CERT program manager.

“Certified teams are deployed to disastrous situations, say, flooding,” Murray said. “The team then assesses the situation and damage and prioritizes where to send out officials.”

Murray added that at the moment Champaign does not have a team, but several counties in the nation do.

CERT is a program of the Champaign Area Citizen Corps, which runs programs such as the Neighborhood Watch.

It is nationally funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and the Department of Homeland Security, said Sgt. Jim Clark of the Champaign Police Department.

“Our $20 registration fee covers classroom supplies, and we are also given a grant of about $5,000 to $6,000 a year,” Clark said. “We were given $5,500 for 2010, and that covers training equipment and teacher salaries.”

Murray said the classes are taught by a pool of instructors from the Champaign police and fire departments, and instructors from the Urbana Police Department have helped in the past as well.

“The classes are taught with demonstrations, lesson plans and a lot of hands-on activities,” Murray said. “All of that accumulates into a field exercise on the last day of class, where the students go out and handle a mock disaster.”

Murray said the classroom covers almost any type of natural disaster imaginable, including medical operations, light search and rescues, fire safety preparedness and terrorism.

The class curriculum focuses primarily on what is happening during the time of the year the program is offered.

The big focus for the spring classes is thunderstorms. In the fall, the focus is on winter-related natural disasters, Murray said.

“We’re training individuals in basic responder skills and giving them an understanding of how mass casualty situations are handled,” he said.