Interviewer: How are you connected to the Great Southern
California ShakeOut?
Cheryl Curley: Well, I provide safety training and emergency
preparedness for the people with disabilities that our
organization serves. And I learned about the ShakeOut
scenario through a Riverside OES Department, and they told us
all about the scenario and we started plugging it in to
our emergency preparedness plan.
Excellent. How exactly has your organization utilized this scenario?
We have been using it to practice but more importantly, we’re
using it for emergency preparedness plan to kind of revamp
it and there are many parts of it that we’re learning that
we need to add and change.
Okay. Cheryl, can you speak to the importance of the
scenario being based on real science? What difference
has that made to you in your organization?
Well, it has made a huge difference actually because we know
that the information is reliable, people take it more
seriously and I can incorporate that into the training, people
pay attention and they learn from it. And we can plug in
specific parts of it, learning that the communication science
will be down was really important to let us know that our
employees, our clients, will be separated from our main office
and we’ll need to make sure that they can communicate with
us in that type of an event.
Cheryl, looking at this Great Southern California ShakeOut
scenario, what inspires you the most? What are you most proud about?
What I’m personally most proud about is that it has given us
an opportunity to include my community, the people with
disabilities, we’ve put together a town hall event called the
ShakeOut Town Hall for People with Disabilities, and we’ll be
able to use that venue to get the word out to people with
disabilities to get themselves prepared in an event of a big emergency.