How CERT or ERT (Emergency Response Team) can quickly coordinate in an emergency

VoicePing's SOS Channel pulls everyone into the same channel for instant voice communication during an emergency

CERT is a group of in-house first responders identified by a company to be competently trained in preventing any emergency from escalating into a major disaster. The primary objective of CERT is to mitigate and control an emergency situation during the initial stages prior to Emergency Services arrival and also to ensure operational synergy between the CERT and Emergency Services.

During daily operational work, most members of the CERT team are conducting their own work. For example a CERT team would normally consist of members from Operations, Finance, Warehouse, Housekeeping etc.

Each of their members would not be on the emergency channel. Instead they would be on their own department’s operational channel. Operational channel for each departments as separated to prevent information overload and to reduce interference from each channel.

However during an emergency, this then causes a problem as you want to quickly get the attention of all CERT members. With traditional two way radio, you would have to broadcast the emergency on each channel. And you probably have to do this multiple times per channel in case someone missed your first alert. This could take precious time which should be used mitigating the incident rather than trying to get everyone alerted.

In VoicePing, companies have the option to setup a SOS channel. For example Channel “999-SOS”. If a member of the CERT team comes to know of any emergency, they can then change to “999-SOS’” and send an SOS.

Sending an SOS will broadcast an alert to all group members/CERT members. It will also pull them into the “999-SOS” Channel. He will then start hearing any conversation that is on-going in “999-SOS”.

With this, getting the alert to the entire CERT team only takes a few seconds and more time can be spent on mitigating the incident.

You can also use the SOS function while someone is talking. This will interrupt all active conversations. This feature is very useful when you need the attention of the whole group for a top priority matter.