Joliet trains bilingual volunteers for crisis response squad

The city of Joliet’s new team of volunteer responders will have a bilingual squad.

The Community Emergency Response Team being formed this year has reached 50 members, and another 15 are being brought in to reach out to Spanish-speaking residents.

“About 30% of our population in the city is Spanish speaking,” John Lukancic, director of the city’s Office of Emergency and Disaster Management, told the bilingual group that assembled recently for its first class.

The language barrier can be a problem in a community emergency, he said.

“In order to bridge that gap, we created this class,” Lukancic told the group.

The class was held at the Spanish Community Center, where Executive Director Sylvia Acosta Chavez was among the pupils.

Acosta Chavez said communication is “incredibly important” in an emergency.

“In those situations, we want everyone to feel supported and have someone they can reach out to,” she said.

Even for those Spanish-speaking residents who speak some English, communication in an emergency or disaster could be difficult, she said.

“There are certain words that we don’t always use on a day-to-day basis, so you may not be able to convey everything,” Chavez said.

Flor Fuentes knows the feeling of being unable to help in a disaster.

She was a 5-year-old in Mexico City in 1985, when the city was struck by an earthquake that killed 10,000 people.

“It was hard to see a lot of people hurt, and you couldn’t help them,” said Fuentes, remembering even as a child wanting to help.

Still, many Mexico City residents did help their neighbors in the disaster. There were so many that their efforts motivated the development of the first CERT program in the U.S. by the Los Angeles Fire Department.

The program is now overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Fuentes, who is in the bilingual class, also is a team captain for Joliet CERT, having previously gone through the training.

“As a community, we have to work together and help each other all the time,” she told fellow members of the bilingual class.

Lukancic pointed to a disaster closer to home as he showed the class a short video about the Plainfield tornado of 1990.

“That tornado killed 29 people and injured hundreds more,” he said, emphasizing that the class members remember those numbers.

“We need resources when a disaster happens,” Lukancic said. “We need people who can get together to get things done, and that means all of us.”