Pala boasts county's first bilingual CERT program

Pala Reservation is the latest North County area to be equipped with its own Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). Unlike prior CERT groups that have been established, this group of 64 is comprised of both English and non-English speaking individuals.

The Inland Valley CERT members graduated from their training program on November 21 after being sworn in by Pala Fire Chief Doug Moriarty.

During the training sessions, translators helped the group learn disaster preparedness, basic fire suppression, first aid, incident command systems, search and rescue, psychological aspects of first respon...