Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge requirement 7a is “Take part in an emergency service project, either a real one or a practice drill, with a Scouting unit or a community agency.” How do you do this while Scouting at home?

A standard part of our city emergency drills could be adapted as an emergency service project. In a disaster, our emergency volunteers quickly collect information about damage with a “windshield survey” or “windshield damage assessment”. That information is collected centrally.

Volunteers make notes of the damage in their neighborhood and report it to our volunteer operations center. The damage could be to houses, water mains, gas lines, roads, or power lines. Information about injuries is also collected. In an actual disaster, this would be forwarded to our city EOC for city-wide situational awareness and to dispatch our professional or volunteer emergency response teams.

As I write this, our next drill is tomorrow evening. I’ll be at our volunteer operations center running a two-way radio net to collect this information from neighborhood volunteers.

Our city Damage Assessment Form collects summary information on the front and has instructions on the back.

Emergency Service Project

Organize a “windshield survey” or “windshield damage assessment”. This is done by walking or driving an area and making notes of the damage. For our drills, it is earthquake damage, but it could also be from a windstorm or other disaster.

Each drill has a list of fake incidents, so “water main broken at Ferne and Leaf”, “gas leak at 1120 Ferne”, and so on. The lists are distributed to the volunteers in the matching neighborhood. Each local team enters the their incidents on a damage assessment form, then reports the incident summary to the central collection point, “net control”. Net control enters the data on their own copy of the form. At the end of he drill, we check that all the incidents were reported and transmitted properly.

Another approach would be to list things are already in the neighborhood, like “blooming flowers in front”, “porch light on”, “two cars in driveway”, “boat”, and so on. For the drill to work well, those should be present in the neighborhood but not at every address, maybe one each per block. Those reports get rolled up for a block or neighborhood, then called in to net control.

Reports could be sent through phone calls, text messages, emails, or FRS two-way radios. Our volunteers use an internet app if available, but also practice with radios that work without the Internet. The Scout organizing the drill gets to choose thee communication technology.

The Scout should do a dry run, with a couple of checks on nearby streets to see if incident collection works, then report to a helper using the damage assessment form. After that, make the final damage assessment forms, make fake damage data if needed, organize the participants, including teaching them how to use the form, then run the drill.

The entire drill can be run without making in-person contact. Training can be remote. Reporting is not face to face.

Your city emergency response volunteers may already do this. The fire department almost certainly knows how to do this kind of assessment.

Update: From a Facebook comment: You could drive home the seriousness of the service by having each of those examples STAND FOR a serious issue that would have the same rate of incidence – give a translation sheet that says, for example, flowers blooming out front gets marked as “small tree limbs down”, a house with two cars gets marked “vehicle damage”, a home with a flag gets marked as “broken windows” and a home with a full size flag on a flagpole gets marked as “hazardous structural damage”.