Disaster Preparedness Hits Home

Local heroes are all around us. Some are obvious — wearing the uniforms of police and fire personnel. Others not so much.

Harold Bobrow is one of those lesser known.

Bobrow, a Maplewood resident, is a pharmacist on a federal rescue team — NJ-1 Dmat. "We are a mash unit that is sent out in disasters," explains Bobrow, "such as 911, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti — when the medical infrastructure can no longer handle the over load."

When Patch spoke with Bobrow on Friday, he had just received an email seeking team members to stage for deployment to Japan. The email said that a three-week commitment would be needed.

As of Monday morning, Bobrow said that, although teams were "standing down" and had not been deployed to Japan as yet, six federal teams were staging on the west coast and other teams were being positioned to back them up throughout the country.

"It's very timely that I contacted you about this," said Bobrow who had emailed Patch about a disaster training program he attended before the quake and tsunami hit Japan late last week.

Bobrow explains that "NJ 1- Dmat" stands for New Jersey Disaster Medical Assistance Team. "I am also a member of a Medical Reserve Core unit, and a Cert team." Bobrow has also served as a member of the Maplewood Volunteer First Aid Squad in the past.

Many know Bobrow locally from his 34 years of running his own pharmacy in town —  Maple Pharmacy at 149 Maplewood Avenue where the Maplewood Deli and Grill is now located. Bobrow currently works at the pharmacy at the clinic at Rutgers University in Newark, teaches at Essex County College, and has developed a course teaching pharmacy students to become advocates for their patients. Bobrow was in Washington, D.C. presenting the course last week.

Bobrow wanted to reach out to Patch readers to let them know "what the government is doing to safeguard us."

He recently completed training offered by the Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston, Alabama. The CDP develops and delivers advanced training for emergency response providers, emergency managers and other government official from state, local and tribal governments. The Center offers more than 50 training courses focuing on incident management, mass casualty reponse, and emergency response to a catastrophic natural distaster or terrorist act.

Training at the Center is federally funded at no cost to state or local governments or emergency response professionals or their agencies.

Bobrow received training  in critical skills to responsd effectively to potential weapons of mass destruction (WMD) events.

Training available at CDP also includes healthcare and public health courses at the Nobel Training Facility, referred to as "the nation's only hospital dedicated to training healthcare professionals in disaster preparedness and response."

Information on CDP training programs can be found at http://cdp.dhs.gov.