Trials and Errors #55: Radio's Role in the 1917 Halifax Explosion

This is the forum discussion for article 55 in our series. In this case, discussing emergency radio communications and in particular the events in Halifax as the explosion nearly destroys the city. Find the original article at this link, and post your commentary below. Thanks for reading! Dave, W7DGJ

 

Being an Alaskan, I can grok this. AS they say - been there, do that.

Radio to the rescue — Ham operators establish link with world after earthquake | The Mouth of The Kenai

The Good Friday Quake - M9.2 - still resonates today.

Now with satphones, satcom enabled smartphones and satcom internet, ham radio is moot for most disaster preps. Still, local clubs, like KL7AA and the air base station KL7AIR maintain multiple HF and repeater stations 'just in case'.

 

I do not have similar, personally experienced, episodes to mention or add, but I will say this:
As Don/KL7KN says, satphones, satcom enabled smartphones and satcom internet are what may be generally used in such situations assuming "normal" channels are down. But they are mainly a "point to point" mode of communication. Radio, be it Ham or other, is what I would call a "wide area" and "anyone who is listening gets the info" means of getting the word out to wherever it needs to go (plus potentially everywhere else ), so will always (or should always) be available . Hopefully with experienced/trained operators at the key or mic.

My wife and I were in Halifax some 30 +/- years ago, unfortunately in early September and the tourist/traveler season had pretty much wound down. Many of the museums and attractions were not staffed so we could only read the placards and such. We gleaned a superficial overview of the explosion and aftermath but we were left with many questions.
Your article fills in many of the gaps. Thank you Dave.
Mac/WT4BT

 

As pointed out in the essay, amateur radio enthusiasts had to take all their equipment off the air at the outbreak of war. The emergency radio messages were sent and received by commercial operators whose job it was to handle such traffic.

 

Do you think that if there was another global conflict, that the USA and Canada would do the same with amateurs? I don't think anyone would "care enough" about what we do to stop it. Dave (plus the war would be so short in comparison . . . ugh)

 

Don, thank you for posting this. I was just a kid at the time -- I don't remember the quake and I really enjoyed reading about the response from hams. A US Postal Service Commemorative Stamp for those A.R. operators! Wow -- that would be a cool stamp for radio folks who are stamp collectors. Dave, W7DGJ --Anyone have one, or a photo to post? Dave W7DGJ

 

caption with this stamp:
The “Amateur Radio” postage stamp was issued in 1964 to honor the Amateur Radio Relay League for its important work during the devastating 1964 Alaska earthquake. In the aftermath of this natural disaster, amateur radio operators provided essential emergency communications, which greatly aided relief and rescue operations.

This listing is for 10 total vintage postage stamps of the stamp pictured herein. $4.45 for each stamp, sold only in lots of 10..

 

As the events happened in 1917, the regulations in force were the 1912 London Radio Regulations and the 1914 SOLAS Convention.

Both those regulations primarily dealt with operating procedures and equipment onboard ships, as shore or coast stations had a very limited role in contemporary maritime safety procedures.
Ships were expected to rescue other ships with minimal involvement of land-based infrastructure.

In this case, message relaying between ship stations and ultimately coast stations helped to bridge the gaps caused by the disruption of land-line facilities.

As noted, amateur radio had been prohibited at the outbreak of war, due to national security reasons in countries where it was permitted pre-WW1. This, for all practical purposes, was confined to the Anglosphere.
In other areas, amateur radio was either prohibited or an "undefined state".

Today, the actual value of having amateur radio operators available for "emergency communications", has become very uncertain.

Modern communications infrastructure has become very diversified and by means of mesh-shaped networks and redundant functions, much more resilient than in previous eras. Both consumer grade networks and those for public safety purposes have benefited greatly from cheap fibre-optic bandwidth and from distributed architectures.

This has been recently shown in practice from experiences in the war in Ukraine, where civilian/commercial infrastructure has handled a bulk of tactical messages.

Up to now, it appears that traditional "Emcomm" by radio amateurs has not been used in any measurable extent.

As a systems designer for both GMDSS-compliant infrastructure for maritime radio, and for both military and civilian contingency networks, my views are that it would take a complete collapse of society due to nuclear war or similar, to render modern infrastructure non-functional, and then we are facing problems that no communications can solve.

Essential communications functions are "hardened" to an extent which radio amateurs simply do not have the resources to handle.
Add to this the amateur demographics, with a median age approaching 70.

Should a major war in, say Europe, break out, my informed guess is that
the emergency clauses in most amateur radio regulations would be invoked, prohibiting operations, but the Authorities would not be very concerned if amateurs would go off-air or not.

The practical influence of a small fraction of the population, aged around 70, having access to low-capacity radio communications, will be negligible compared to the other stresses imposed on societal life by a major war.

 

Karl-Arne, I am always happy to see your comments here as they are written in a top-flight communication style, to the point, and always thought has gone into them. I see you would agree with my statement in the article that there would be a general "who cares" attitude about amateurs remaining on the air during wartime, although regulations might ask that it be stopped. Let's hope we never find out about those situations that truly need RF as a communications tool. Dave, W7DGJ

 

I had a colleague who had worked with the "radio branch" of the Security Police, and his views were that "general operations" in times of crisis or war would not be high on their list of priorities, but radio use that may cause interference or service disruptions certainly would.

Certainly, but I fear that we may find out sooner than later.
Perhaps not in the form of a major nuclear conflict, but instead by economic or societal breakdowns leading to civil war in the US and from "asymmetrical warfare" or "special operations" in Europe by Russia.

In both cases, worries about exam contents, licence conditions or tariffs on amateur gear will be among our least worries.

There are few things that I am happier about than not having any children.

 

Commercial and Public Safety communications systems keep getting better and better. A lot of advances have also been made in the cell system as well. Unfortunately the key word here is "system". There's infrastructure (sometimes a lot of it) between you and me. There are many points of failure in any "system". HF communications on the other hand has no intermediate points of failure. If my radio works and yours does too we can communicate and pass traffic. The US federal government recognizes this and the amateur service is considered a viable backup for emergency communications. (at least according to what I have read). The incident in Halifax is a glowing illustration of this fact. As long as there are hams out there willing to help in an emergency I suspect that amateur radio will survive.

 

Except that there were no radio amateurs involved in this incident, only professionals onboard ships who improvised a workaround for the land-line outage.

In order to replicate this, radio amateurs need to have proper training and access to "hardened resources" which must be more resilient than the system components that they aim to replace.

If this is practicable in a major crisis is a very open question.

 

Great article and this event was told when we visited Halifax a few years ago. Ham radio will always have a place during emergencies.
In 1993 in East Tennessee we had a true blizzard that caused wide spread power outages and emergencies. Local hams were able to transport Docs and Nurses to the hospital and help get needed supplies to those in trouble.
I’ve personally stayed with an injured hiker I came across until the rangers arrived after getting help via my 2 meter hand held in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Be willing to get involved when the need arises! Answer any mayday call when heard. When I was 16, I made the first call to notify the State Department when Nicaragua 1972 earthquake occurred. The USA embassy used ham radio to make contact. You will never know when you will make a difference by tuning around or being prepared.
A close call happened one year driving back from a trip to Maine. A hurricane was moving through Virginia and a tornado had flipped over an 18 wheeler and we got stuck in traffic. More tornados had been spotted heading for this traffic jam. I had my wife take over driving and grabbed the hand held. I ran a mile to the accident site. I found a highway patrol and said “You need to listen to this emergency statement.” Another tornado is heading at us. He told the wrecker driver to push the 18 wheeler off the road. He had traffic moving before I could get back to my car. I jumped in as my wife came by. Lucky that the jam cleared.
I’m sure there are thousands of time where ham radio ‘saved the day’.

 

My first trip to KL7 was just two years ago, awesome!

There was a very nice write up on the comms contributions of radio amateurs to relief efforts in the July 1964 QST magazine page 46. It's a long read well worth it. Here is just a clip from the preface, with bold highlights on what I think are important points.

"Earthquakes are almost entirely unpredictable, That is, we know they are more apt. to occur at one place than another, in a general way, but usually they come on completely without, warning. When it happens, everybody is caught by surprise. In an organizational sense, Alaska was not “ready” for a communications emergency. Some good c.d. organization exists in Anchorage, but otherwise it couldn’t have happened in a worse place.

And yet, in this emergency which affected communications in the entire United States and Canada, the KL7s showed up in droves. True, some of them were ill-prepared, both in equipment and skill, to handle the tremendous volume of traffic which descended on them. Despite this and other drawbacks, the nation's presses and other news media, as well as officialdom, have been ringing with praises of the amateurs performance during the aftermath of the earthquake.

This writeup is more concerned with what mas done than with what should have been done. One could write a book on the latter, because hindsight is always better than foresight. Our analysis of reports received (48 from KL7s, hundreds from others! shows a grand total of 314 Alaskan amateurs participating in the emergency operation in one way or another. Considering the potential total, this is a whale of a lot of hams. (There are about. 1200 licensed amateurs in Alaska.) Reports from the other 49 states show a total of over 1000 amateurs taking part in the Alaskan traffic-handling in one way or another. Any way you look at it, it was a big operation. Personal inquiry traffic got so thick on the networks that it had to be piled up on the west coast, awaiting outlets, as the traffic flowed from Alaska in a steady stream. National Traffic System nets were unable even to begin to handle the load. No communications system could have done it. Western Union, the Bell System, the military and all others were hopelessly bogged down. Only when the outgoing traffic slowed down was it possible to take care of the personal inquiries, most of them by that time obviated. Red Cross estimates that something like 70,000 such messages were stacked up at one time, awaiting an outlet into Alaska. ... "

More recently the hurricane Maria disaster in Puerto Rico where an ad hoc group of hams not associated with the national societies task force produced a similar operation, smaller in total traffic handled but I can attest first hand that each message that conveyed survival news was emotionally appreciated like a lottery win.

 

Great stuff, Jay, thanks! Dave W7DGJ