Public Service Activities - Reality or PR Fluff?

<h1>Public Service Activities - Reality or PR Fluff?</h1>
<h3>de WB9GVF, Jim Aspinwall</h3>


In response to hearing about ARLB021 notifying amateurs of a state of emergency in Texas and Louisiana due to severe flooding one ham I’m acquainted with inquired about the real effectiveness and legitimacy of amateur radio participation in disaster situations.


He was curious about the kind of traffic handled during the typical emergency net, how critical amateur radio was to the emergency at hand, if there are places where amateur radio operators exceed the number of working cellular telephones.



He acknowledged that emergency operations were great PR for ham radio, wondered how much of it is for real - how often does amateur radio truly affect the outcome of a real emergency or distress situation? Imagining county sheriffs’ posse members or volunteer firefighters sitting in a shack eating free donuts and coffee while handling 'lost pet' emergencies.



The questions were from someone who lives in a part of the country relatively unaffected by natural disasters and might well not know what many of us have been through and know about the reality of significant emergency and disaster events. As such they could also be the questions any public official or government department manager might ask or have asked in the course of considering the availability of amateur radio to contribute to short and long term disaster planning. They might well be the questions from a friend or relative wondering what all this radio stuff is really for.



To these questions I offer what I anticipate are experiences and observations similar to those shared by anyone who has participated in real disaster situations – large or small. Your experiences, local situations and available technologies both government and amateur may vary, but there are some salient points to consider.



I've been working emergency and public service operations since I got my ham license at age 15 (30+ years ago.) Those activities took place in Wisconsin during tornadoes and ice storms, Texas with hurricanes and flash floods, and California with earthquakes, vegetation fires, and floods. As a result of and with continue interest in such activities I became and served as a volunteer firefighter for over 5 years in two communities in Texas, and have been employed in commercial and public safety communications services. I continue to build and maintain several UHF amateur radio systems in support of readiness for the next “big one” to hit California.



Amateur radio participation during emergencies may consist of anything from actual field data collection (location and characteristics of wind, rain, snow, ice, traffic, flooded areas, etc.) to staffing and monitoring checkpoints along evacuation routes to search-and-rescue operations to staffing shelters and hospital communications points for gathering and passing health-and-welfare information about civilians or medical/food/provisioning needs.



These operations require a significant number of capable and skilled communications resources that the managers, administrators, workers or general public are not trained or available to handle (a Red Cross station manager needs to tend to Red Cross business, not communications details – they want information to get through – they do not want to be part of the medium), or gain the advantage of technology that is not commercially available or permitted, or that these agencies cannot afford for ‘maybe’ deployment. That or these agencies need to communicate in areas that government and commercial agencies traditionally do not engineer or have radio coverage for. A true emergency roll-out requires a ratio of between 1:10 to 1:100 of communications resources to actual incident workers. Amateur radio operators provide a ready source of vast amounts of manpower and communications equipment, and know how to use it.



For example - the California Dept. of Forestry places a ham as a shadow to senior firefighting personnel on the ground while staffing a spotter plane or chopper with another ham equipped with ATV, GPS and mapping software. At a ground station the spotter-system can accurately track the fire team and the fire to provide precise direction for tactical efforts as well as photographic data to other fire tactic planners for resource planning and deployment. Even though CDF now has the assets of the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, with full mobile satellite, phone, data and completely agile radio capability, there are a limited number of those units and they may not get to all of the scenes where they are needed, and they are not video or radio-location equipped for ground or aerial deployment. Hams are such a critical part of their resource planning and working assets they are written into the official state operations manuals.



During the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, and not unlike other affected areas Murphy takes control - most/all of the San Francisco government and public safety communications systems (shared, trunked, computer controlled) were absolutely useless. The lo-band radio system in use in the San Francisco police cars barely work, the UHF system was out or too busy and had no simplex talk-around provision. San Francisco Fire Department was on a trunked system with no alternate simplex capability within the system and had limited and barely adequate VHF simplex capabilities in some units. The cellular telephone system was out of service in most spots and overloaded in others. The second most quake damaged area was out of reach to most resources - being on the far side of a mountain range where jurisdiction and other issues and no perceived need meant that there were no (or not enough) commercial or government systems capable of handling the significant communications needs to get resources from the other side of the hill.



During 1983’s Hurricane Alicia nearly every amateur radio operator, club and system from New Orleans to San Antonio and beyond were on active alert or standby to provide communications for the few critical evacuation routes between the Gulf Coast and safer, further dry ground away from the storm’s uncertain path. Knowing if and estimating how many people were traveling to which potential destinations gave potential shelters advance notice of what to staff up for. With electricity and telephone systems crippled or about to be, making sure that adequate food, clothing and shelter supplies were available and where they should be deployed was critical. In cases where full evacuation was not necessary or reasonable (the entire city of Houston for example) local government systems were sure to be overloaded with 911 calls, every available police and fire unit tasked with some form of preventive, pro-active or responsive duty. Several of us hams were also members of a suburban volunteer fire department and prepared backup communications for ourselves and were available to nearby Houston Fire Department units. In short, for the local and distant evacuation shelters, traffic routes and immediate weather condition information, and any necessary backup communications, no other resource was available.



During a severe 1976 ice storm in Wisconsin EVERYTHING outdoors was covered in 2-4 inches of ice. This rendered most/all conventional stationary (mostly VHF) communications systems useless. No cell phones existed at that time. The RCC phone and paging systems I was responsible for were off the air for a time (and we had not enough of them to do much good.) Placing hams where needed, they adapted to the conditions and places of need as presented, essentially duplicating and replacing critical communications systems until the ice melted when techs could begin to climb towers to replace broken antennas and damaged feedlines – spares of which were not on-hand of course.



The involvement and net traffic during an emergency is a lot more than reporting a traffic wreck, a cat in a tree, or the 6-for-25 cents donut specials at LuLu's Cafe. The communications systems that are formed as needed have to adapt to and provide communications where none was ever needed or anticipated before - from HF or relayed VHF/UHF to distant safe areas that have food and supplies to be requested and brought in to becoming a floating army of rescue vehicles to covering miles of evacuation routes to tromping through acres of burned forest - who else but a hundred or so willing hams could or would dig-in, plug-in and setup a customized and dynamic communications system? And if you’re wondering what part another ham on HF across the country can play in someone else’s local disaster just work any HF band and experience the shifts of conditions and you’ll know that you could play a critical role assisting flood victims in Houston relaying traffic through your HF station in Seattle or Buffalo.



If you are at all familiar with conventional and the new high tech commercial and public safety systems you know that they are full of holes and vulnerabilities, expensive and often not duplicated/shadowed, incapable of mass amounts of traffic, completely non-configurable at a week's notice much less hours, and almost 500% incompatible with each other. To that you add regulations, policies and politics and an agency's need to maintain it's own communications without any margin to add new traffic. Many public service agencies will tell you that their communications systems are almost always operating at capacity. Adding sudden significant amounts of new disaster traffic sends them over the edge.



The vulnerability of cell phones is that a) 'everyone' has one, b) cell systems become overloaded if remain on the air at all, c) most people who have them aren't in the right places at the right time, d) they (people) are not prepared for sustained operations, e) the phone becomes 4 oz of useless technology when the battery dies, f) the cell system is strictly point-to-point, not networked or group-oriented like trunked or Nextel systems, g) getting enough people with enough phones tied into the right comm center at the same time is impossible, h) cell phone users are not equipped for data or video as may be needed in special cases.



There are at least four different cellular technologies/infrastructures that are not and cannot be easily inter-tied. In most major areas those four technologies are split across distinctly different systems that eventually merged. The system is designed for essentially dial-tone replacement - it is not a communications system and cannot be reconfigured to perform otherwise. (A similar problem exists in the high $$ public safety and commercial trunked systems, plus licensing and regulatory restrictions - and then dump truck drivers generally do not make good emergency communications backup personnel)



Skilled and resourceful hams, truly into this and deliberately prepared for disaster or not, can provide at least 100% if not 1000% backup of local communications resources, a tremendous amount of flexibility and mobility that commercial and government resources would never imagine (budgets, politics, institutional thinking, etc.) possible much less implement.



The publicity amateur radio does get, whether a TV sound bite or a full article in QST, cannot possibly convey the complexity and multitude of tasks/services that amateur radio provides in any given emergency. If you can listen in on some of the emergency activities parts of it may seem very boring - monitoring the progress of a truckload of food going from a Safeway warehouse 200 miles to a shelter in the middle of the mess; lists of names of loved ones sitting tight at a shelter or inquiries from outside the shelter to determine if someone is safe; water levels or drainage flow rates; but over the course of an incident, cumulatively these seemingly mundane communications provide many people needed food, shelter and safety that they otherwise had benefit of in the comfort of their homes and suddenly do not. Ham radio suddenly becomes the very necessary extended tool of otherwise normal life support systems.



It's not about heroics or making the geekiest cool radio set - it's about hunger, cold, survival, as well as the emotions of people just like you and I, many of us who are sitting in the comforts of our dry, warm intact homes with full pantries, feather beds and electricity to run our PCs and super HF stations, yacking on our micro-HTs through functional whiz-bang repeaters.



Take your aunt/uncle, mother/dad, grand-kids, separate them from husband/wife, home, electricity, food and possessions, stuff them into a noisy gymnasium or national guard armory with 250 screaming kids, shaken and demanding civilians displaced by mother nature, hand them a blanket and rickety cot, food and beverage yet to be delivered, medication/wheelchair left in a flooded living room who's roof has been ripped off by high winds, and think about how you're going to know they are OK, get them food, replace their medications and get them to the comfort of family as quickly as possible. I kind of like the idea that I can rely on 100 or so of my currently unknown but soon to be closest buddies in the ham community to look after those folks in some big or small way - because I know that Sheriff Joe or Mayor Smith has NO possible way to deal with 1 much less 100, 1000 or 10,000 individual disaster victims.



Forget donuts - knowing that grandma is safe with a cup of weak coffee and a stale cheese sandwich can be pretty welcome news someday - that someone found her and got her there, that there is food, that her medications are on the way, and that you can find out are no trivial aspects to this hobby.



My motto: “lack of information is a dangerous thing”