What is OVERT?

The Ontario Volunteer Emergency Response Team (OVERT) Inc. is an entirely new concept in community participation, education and response to major incidents and disasters.

Traditionally, community organizations are used for "outside the tape" roles during a disaster, this referring to the fact that many organizations provide "low risk" assistance.  OVERT is not traditional. Our vision is to provide an integrated, professional, reliable and experienced community response to front line emergency services. This new concept is referred to as "second tier response." OVERT is the first program of its type in Ontario that provides the emergency services with a community based "inside the tape" surge capacity.

"Surge capacity" refers to an emergency service agency’s ability to have enough extra equipment, personnel and resources available to deal with anything other then the day-to-day call volume or regular emergencies. When a major incident occurs the effected service must find additional resources to deal with the incident.

As recently as August 2004, representatives from emergency service agencies in Ontario reported to the Ontario Government’s Standing Committee on Justice Policy that most if not all local emergency services in Ontario had a very limited "surge capacity" to deal with major events.  OVERT provides "focused surge capacity" to local police, fire, EMS, hospitals, public health, social services and local emergency measures agencies.  

What is "focused surge capacity"?

Focused surge capacity refers to the ability of an agency like OVERT to provide the personnel, equipment and resources needed to provide specific relief to overwhelmed Emergency Services. This must be done without adding any additional burden to their logistics supply or Management Team.  As a multi-role agency OVERT is capable of providing relief in numerous situations. This capability allows the deployment of professionally trained and experienced volunteers in specialized roles to help relieve the operational stress placed on the Emergency Services during a major incident. 

 

How do the volunteers find the time to participate?

OVERT has been successful in distributing its response workload amoung the entire volunteer base. This means that everyone is doing their share. For some that has meant only meeting the yearly minimum of eighty hours of training/events as well as an average of twenty-five hours of response time a year.

Our volunteer’s still lead normal lives, the OVERT program in no way restricts a person’s normal activity. The difference with our program however is that the volunteer must take responsibility for notifying their supervisor when they are not available to respond for a certain period of time. In OVERT each volunteer understands the importance of getting operational experience, which is, why they are encouraged to respond when called to any incident within two hundred kilometers of where they live.