Well, I survived. Until we get an after-action incident report from Jeff, this will have to suffice.

We met in the Physicians Conference Center at Inova Fairfax Hospital at 2200. Security escorted each of us to our assigned locations and introduced us to the person in charge of that location (Charge Nurse, Etc). At 2303, by my watch, an announcement was made over the intercom/public address system that the phones were now down and that the "Powerloss Phones (Blue Phones)" should be used. These phones were direct dial business lines of the POTS variety (Plain Old Telephone Service).

The revised schedule from GTE called for them to have the system back online by 0200. Like so many good plans, it didn't work. There were 90% operational by 0200, but that last 10% had not been reached when I had to leave at 0350.

I cannot speak for the other personnel there, but things went smoothly as far as I was concerned. We operated on two separate UHF frequencies. The Women & Children's side of the hospital was on Bravo net and the main hospital was on Alpha net. This was accomplished via two cross-band radios being placed in the parking garages...one in each garage. It worked great.

Here are a couple of pictures of some of the group during the briefing.

On Saturday June 17th at 2200 hours, approximately 50 operators will be needed to support a hospital-wide phone outage at INOVA Fairfax Hospital.

The outage begins at Midnight and is anticipated to be over by about 04:30 at the latest.

The outage is planned in order to correct problems that have caused two recent ARES activations at the hospital due to phone failures.

If you can assist, email me.