By Doug Stinson – KG6ADR
Hams take pride in using their hobby to provide public service. In particular, Amateur Radio has a long and distinguished history of providing communications after earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters. ARES and RACES are organizations within the ham community that specialize in emergency communications.
Recently, local hams had another opportunity to show-off their public spirit and emergency communications skills. On Saturday, April 29, 2000 at 9:00 AM, 160 volunteer members of CERT, including 29 hams, responded to a simulated magnitude 8.0 earthquake striking Fremont and Union City.
CERT, short for Community Emergency Response Team, is based on the assumption that a widespread emergency will isolate neighborhoods and overtax professional service providers such as the fire department. Everyone should have sufficient training so as not become a victim themselves, and then to organize their neighborhood to cope with the aftermath of the disaster.
At the start of the drill volunteers reported to one of eight staging areas, located in each of the Alvarado, Ardenwood, Centerville, Decoto, Irvington, Mission San Jose, Niles, and Warm Springs districts of Fremont and Union City. As they arrived they had to organize themselves to deal with various scenarios cooked up by the CERT District Coordinator. Teams were faced with simulated collapsed buildings, over-turned tanker trucks, derailed trains, toxic gas releases, and fires of various intensities and extents.
This drill, with teams spread over the entire
100 square miles of Fremont and Union City, was the first realistic test
of CERT communications. Consistent with the cities’ disaster preparedness
plans, ARES set up a net control operation in the radio room of the Fremont
Police Department, close to the Police Department’s Field Operation Center
(FOC). This directed net, controlled by Jim Wood (KE6IVA), provided voice
communications between districts and with city officials. Because CERT
generally is involved with search and rescue activities, most of its traffic
is directed to the Fire Department. To handle this, ARES established a
packet radio connection between the Police FOC and the Fire Department
FOC. Mike Fung (WA6AWI) manned the terminal at the Police Department, while
Ray Wong (KE6OGM) and Syd Furman (W6QWK) staffed the packet station at
Fire FOC.
Meanwhile, each district had to establish its
own communications procedures. The resources (people and equipment) as
well as the nature of the incidents determined the exact structure of each
district’s communications organization.
For communication resources, the districts could draw on members of
the CERT Amateur Radio Team (CART). CART is a semi-informal organization
of people who have passed CERT training and have their Amateur Radio License.
ARES supports CART by assisting in providing additional training in emergency
communications to CART members. A training team consisting of Mike Fung,
Ray Wong, Joe Peterson (KE6YHG), Nancy Peterson (KF6HOI), Brian Krause
(KF6ZGC) and David Ward (VE7DWJ) put in many hours developing and delivering
a series of classes tailored to CERT communications procedures. Some districts
also pulled in “future CERT” hams to help staff their operations.
All districts appointed a ham radio operator from their ranks to exchange messages between the district’s Incident Command Post and net control. Most districts also had a second ham running a sub-net for communication between the command post and the district’s search and rescue teams, for those teams equipped with ham radios. The Irvington, Niles and Mission San Jose districts ran sub-nets based on Family Service Radio, as well. In Ardenwood, Florence Wong (KF6GAH) experimented with a packet connection to net control.
By all accounts, the drill was a resounding success. Members of search and rescue teams reported that the addition of radio communications to their teams significantly increased their effectiveness. Fire Department officials commented on the quality of the effort by all participants, but particularly those involved in communication. The fact that requests and status reports from the districts were received by packet radio, printed in triplicate, and delivered to the Fire Department’s FOC added a certain patina of professionalism to the proceedings! According to the Fremont Fire Department’s acting Division Chief Victor Valdes, “By incorporating amateur radio into our city’s Disaster Management Operations plan we are able to expand our response and reporting capabilities far beyond what would be possible from our normal staffing for Fire and Police Departments. The performance at the April 20, 2000 drill confirmed the tremendous service that amateur radio can provide to their community in a disaster.”
One of the purposes of drills such as this is to uncover problems and learn from mistakes. In this the drill was also a success!
Since all districts shared the same 2 meter frequency for within-district communications, obeying common rules, such as using the lowest power required for reliable contact, were reinforced. In spite of the potential conflicts of a common frequency, reports were that people were generally “well behaved”.
Net control operated primarily on the WA6PWW repeater, although a test was conducted using simplex. This resulted in one of the big surprises of the day: net control, with an antenna on the police department’s tower, was the weakest station heard! This was tracked down to an incorrectly wired duplexer, which was subsequently repaired. Inter-district simplex communication was otherwise reasonably good, however it is clear that for reliable simplex operation, each district needs field-deployable antennas to supplement the ubiquitous “rubber ducky”.
It also became clear that, for effective communications, other members of the district incident command post staff, besides the radio staff, need training in emergency communications procedures. In fact, one important roll hams can play is to provide impromptu “just-in-time” training to other CERT team members.
However, the most important lesson learned
was that having trained radio operators integrated into the CERT teams,
and having excellent cooperation between the various segments of the ham
community, will greatly improve our chances of surviving the next “big
one”.