Drilling with my battalion neighbors at NERT's Citywide Drill Spring 2025

The NERT Citywide Drill Spring 2025 was held at the Couny Fair building in Golden Gate Park this weekend for SF Fire Department neighborhood emergency response team (NERT) volunteers. I’ve been a certified NERT since 2018 and this is the fourth citywide drill I’ve now participated in.

Besides meeting up with NERTs I’m in touch with as the Cow Hollow and Marina District coordinator role I took on since 2024, there were some new opportunities I especially appreciated. Among them:

BATTALION DRILLS

NERT has shifted from small neighborhood teams to Battalion-based groups that encompass 5 or 6 neighborhoods. It’s how we will organize and stage response together in a disaster. We drilled with our Battalion 4 mates, so got to meet them and work with them for the first time. There were 10-12 of us when I joined them for the ALL HAZARD ROOM, a drill that combines a bunch of hazards: water leaks, gas leaks, downed electrical wiring, a victim trapped under heavy rubble, an uninjured neighbor in a wheelchair who wants to stay with the trapped victim, a sudden fire that needs to be suppressed, and earthquake aftershocks.

RADIO OPS, STAGING AREAs

Most of the day I was with the Hams (I got my Technician license last year and haven’t had much chance to use it yet). At this citywide event, radio operators had drills: there was an Auxiliary Communications System Field Team, with Planning and Walking radio groups for two disaster staging areas that mimicked the staging areas we’d set up for each Battalion group in the event of an emergency. I shadowed/scribed for a radio operator taking down incoming incident messages from our Walker and random people coming to the staging area to report their findings, like building collapses, fires, and injuries needing medical attention and rescue, and then communicating that to ACS Field Leader who interfaced with Battalion.

STOP THE BLEED & OPIOID OVERDOSES

There was a short class on naloxone and tourniquets, which I hadn’t taken before. Now we know how to identify an opioid overdose symptoms, and administer a naloxone dose, as well as apply a tourniquet and make a tourniquet in the field with a strip of fabric and a ballpoint pen. Wouldn’t you like to know how to do this? I think we could all learn it. I want to see this common sense public service instruction everywhere, like on bus stops!

DISASTER VICTIM TRAINING VOLUNTEERS

I didn’t do the FIELD TRIAGE drill this time but saw children victim-actors with simulated injuries: broken bones, lacerations. The kids were disaster victim training volunteers and they helped NERTs practice what we’d do to help them if we encountered them in our neighborhoods after a disaster struck and before emergency services could reach them.

Take a look at a video reel of NERT’s Citywide Drill Spring 2025 from the fire department.

Improving a local gateway with indigenous plantings

Saturday morning spent planting native, drought resistant plant species with North End neighbors.

This was the plan: a Saturday morning spent planting native drought resistant plants with my neighbors and others. We would replace a gnarly grass lawn with the hope to make “Richardson and Lombard Streets a more welcoming and beautiful gateway into San Francisco”, in the words of the Cow Hollow Association, and rehabilitate the natural habitat as well.

“Plant food instead!” yelled a drive-by troll.

Thirty of us were on our knees in the dirt, with pick axes and knives, loosening the roots on plants we had just removed from their grow pots. The sun was surprisingly hot for 9:30 a.m., usually this area is slow to warm with all the tall trees and vegetation edging the Presidio not to mention the fogline that people like to say ends at Divisadero, a few blocks further into the city.

“Plant food instead!” a man yelled at us from a car. Literally a drive-by troll.

We were on the highly trafficked road that guides drivers to the Golden Gate Bridge in one direction and welcomes you to the city and neighborhood of Marina District in the other direction. Lots of cars, and carbon monoxide exhaust.

In the Bay Area, people speak their high mind. He’d already zoomed through the intersection but I knew what he meant: create a community food garden, for humans. That’s definitely needed in every area, and I suspect each project needs a plan and resilient support. Yelling the command from a car like a community edge lord doesn’t move the needle much.

It took me a second to react. This IS food, too, I would have told him.

This IS food. These 300 or 400 indigenous plants we’re putting into the ground feed birds, bees, and butterflies.

🤔💭 Our natural resources project with neighbors wasn’t the result of a split second decision, like his, to answer the question “Should we use this particular plot for food for humans or nature?” This particular plot was solved long ago, by a grass lawn. Agitating to change the lawn took three years and a lot of people.

The improvement melds the distinct situation and needs of the land with the ability and interest of the people and organizations around to care for it. Once these small plants and seedlings - grown from seed by the Presidio Nursery where I started volunteering last year - are established, they will not require further irrigation efforts or costs. They are intended to be hardy, and withstand the vagaries of the weather and rain seasons, and carbon monoxide from cars, and thrive.

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Excerpt from Cow Hollow Association newsletter, November 2024. You can donate towards the fencing right here.

The Richardson Gateway Project is the work of numerous area leaders like former city supervisor Catherine Stefani who secured the initial funding of $50,000 three years ago, and Cynthia Gissler of the Cow Hollow Association who invited the neighbors today. We were joined by members of the City’s Department of Public Works and the Presidio Trust, supervised by National Park Service and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy Volunteer Supervisor Staff. Cynthia’s Aunt Caroline, a nonagenarian retired public school teacher, handled our release form paperwork for the day.

We were joined by the newly appointed city supervisor for District 2, Stephen Sherrill and his son.

🙏 to the people who honked with thumbs up, we did see you!

My wish for everyone out there:

I hope you find your chance to contribute to a local garden of your choosing.

If this particular block is anything judge by, community gardens are not “drive-by” efforts. They take commitment, leadership, time, resources, collaboration.

Among the hundreds of plants we put in the ground today: foxtail agave, coyote brush, monkey flower, buckeye, poppies, coffee berry, blue blossom, sage wort, deer grass, hummingbird sage, aster, wild rose, moor grass, anemone, sagebrush, seaside daisy, bluff lettuce.

Biodiversity hot spot grows 150 native species each year for Golden Gate National Parks

Since 1981, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has served as the nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, collaborating with the Presidio Trust, partners, donors, and the community to support the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). The GGNRA stretches across three Bay Area counties, north and south of the Golden Gate Bridge, and includes iconic places such as Muir Woods National Monument, Fort Point National Historic Site, Alcatraz Island, Crissy Field, Mori Point, Lands End, and the Presidio of San Francisco.

I volunteer with park staff at the nursery’s indigenous species greenhouses, shade houses and lab for seed processing and sowing.

Presidio Nursery is a cooperative program of Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, National Parks Service, and Presidio Trust.

Since September 2023, I have done transplanting, pruning, and pot washing and look forward to work in the seed lab during winter 🥼 🌱

These are some of the other tasks available for volunteers at the Presidio Nursery:

• seed collection

• seed cleaning

• transplanting

• pruning

• weeding

• composting

• pot washing

• nursery maintenance

• care of an educational garden

The Presidio is a haven for more rare species per acre than all national parks including Yosemite and Yellowstone.

This international biodiversity hot spot grows 150 plant species and 150,000 plants a year for habitat restoration and reforestation around the Presidio and other parks.

Among other places, you can enjoy their plants at the new Tunnel Tops park at Speaker Nancy Pelosi Plaza. Thanks to Pelosi’s initiative to save the Presidio for the people, the Presidio was designated a National Park 30 years ago.

Repopulating the Presidio with almost-extinct manzanita clones one afternoon.

One afternoon we handled newly discovered Franciscan manzanita that had been cloned for repopulating the Presidio with the species. We washed 100 pots for them to be repotted into later (after steaming, sterilizing, bleaching) these plants are the only ones that exist other than the mother plant.