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After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake the San Francisco Fire Department decided to encourage the formation of self-sufficient neighborhood organizations that would perform medical triage, treatment, and evacuation, light search and rescue, and myriad other tasks required in the 72 post-apocalyptic hours, before outside assistance would arrive. The Neighborhood Emergency Response Team ("NERT") concept had arrived in San Francisco.

Introduction to HAERT

By the summer of 1995 the colorful Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, best known for the flower children that filled its sidewalks during the Summer of Love, still didn't have it's own NERT. I'd spoken with Frank Lucier, the SFFD NERT contact, a year earlier, but I'd gotten side-tracked with book-writing and other projects. When I reconnected with the organization, several others were thinking along the same lines, and in the late summer we had our first Haight-Ashbury NERT training. Immediately thereafter the Haight-Ashbury Emergency Response Team, HAERT, was born.

As the coordinator, it fell to me to organize the large area encompassed by the boundaries of the Haight-Ashbury Emergency Response District (ERD). We had one or two meetings, including a city-wide NERT coordinators meeting, and I left the country for a three-month book-writing trip. Some of this was written before I left, some overseas, and most of it when my return.

As we develop a readiness plan for HAERT I'd like to keep it entirely on the web. Why?

• Maintaining a three ring binder of up-to-date emergency plans and phone numbers is much easier when the source documents are digital.

• Making paper copies of the plan (a good idea before the Big One takes out our power) becomes as simple as printing several source files from within a web browser.

• Providing information and encouragement to others. Perhaps by seeing how we are doing things, you'll be inspired to help organize your neighbood to deal with natural (and man-made) disasters, be they floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or erupting volcanos.

• Getting the benefit of your experience. What are we doing wrong? What are we missing? Please let me know.