I'm in the middle of a six-week crash course to become part of my city's Community Emergency Response Team, or #CERT. CERT is a program backed by FEMA that trains civilian volunteers to be disaster responders, with basic #preparedness, search and rescue, and other relevant skills.

This has been a really fun experience, and I recommend it to anyone in the US whose local municipality offers it. Given how the federal government is currently being dismantled, if you're at all interested, I recommend taking the course sooner rather than later. Don't know if FEMA is going to exist much longer.

More on my experience in a thread...