[Phil Kane[_3_]]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2014 19:12:28 EDT, Channel Jumper
wrote:

Probably where the people in Lincoln Nebraska dropped the ball is that
when they did their Situational Emergency Test - they did not think to
include the people with the CB radios and the people with the GMRS
radios and REACT.

Had they done this - they easily could have gained another 100 or more
people into their active group.
And, once people saw how efficient amateur radio was, another 25 or so
would probably have been inclined to get an amateur radio license.

One of the good sources for our (combined) ARES/RACES teams is the
CERT groups which for most of its history relied on GMRS and FRS for
their comm needs which are different from the RACES comm needs. Some
of the CERT units have formed their own net on 2-meters reaching areas
that GMRS/FRS did not serve. Some of them actually became
"traditional" hams participating in other local ham activities.

For the record, our county ARES/RACES team has over 100 active
members. And this is only for our county. Our local ham club (about
150 dues-paying members) holds license courses all year long and VE
testing once a month. And this is only for one club. There is some
overlap of members between the two activities.

And we're only in the 19th SMA -- not exactly "the big apple" -- with
the City of Portland (OR) which has its own ARES/RACES and club
structures.

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

Member, Washington County, OR
Emergency Communications Team
for ARES/RACES and HEARTNET

Station Co-manager - W7PSV / K7PSV
Providence St. Vincent Medical Center
Disaster Communication Team

[Foxs Mercantile]

On 10/27/2014 5:20 PM, Phil Kane wrote:
For the record, our county ARES/RACES team has over
100 active members. And this is only for our county.
Our local ham club (about 150 dues-paying members)
holds license courses all year long and VE testing
once a month. And this is only for one club. There
is some overlap of members between the two activities.

Eastland County Texas.
1 ARES member. (me.)
2 Extra class licensees. (me and one other.)
3 Club members. (me and two others.)
75 licensed amateurs across the entire county.

Like the old Army recruiting poster, "An army of one."



--
Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi
http://www.foxsmercantile.com

[David Platt]

[A bit late in chiming in here, but it took a while to locate the
document I was hoping for.]

In article ,
Phil Kane wrote:
On Fri, 24 Oct 2014 12:31:02 EDT, Foxs Mercantile
wrote:

So from just a logistic standpoint, how many amateurs would
have been required to bridge 11 million customers?

Do not assume that all 11 million customers would be calling 9-1-1 at
the same time. The public relations value of saying "11 million
customers were stranded" is worth its weight in gold when pointing the
finger.

And where would they be deployed?

That's up to the Emergency Manager - that's why s/he's paid the big
(taxpayer) bucks. In reality that would all be in accordance with a
"continuity of operations" plan jointly developed by the EM and the
carriers. That's where the ball fell down, to coin a phrase, not in
the links from the PSAP to the responding agencies, which are the EM's
responsibility. The "intervening cause" (to use a phrase from tort
law) blurs any bright lines of responsibility.

The article mentioned this affecting
81 call centers. And how many responding agencies/wire centers
are served by each PSAP? Wouldn't that require at least one
amateur at the PSAP and one more at each served end point?

Yep, that's how we are "billeted", but that was not the situation at
hand. The situation at hand was the breakdown in the Rube Goldberg
approach to 9-1-1 call routing.

We had a vaguely similar incident here back in 2009, when some
effectively-targeted vandalism knocked out almost all phone service in
large parts of several counties in my area, during the wee hours of
4/9/2009. Land-line and cell calls were both affected, including
almost all 9-1-1 service. It took most of the day to restore a
substantial amount of the disrupted service.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/articl...ce-3245380.php

Fortunately nobody died (as far as I know) as a result of being able
to call 9-1-1 for medical or fire or police emergencies. It could
easily have been otherwise.

Ham-radio responders were activated by the city and county RACES
organizations, to provide liason communication between public safety
organizations and hospitals, and to serve as points of contact for the
public in case of emergencies. Quite a few hams were posted to fire
and police stations (those being the places that people would tend to
drive to for help). I got a call that morning, was activated as a
RACES MAC (Mutual Aid Communicator, formally called up for service by
my city and then "loaned out" to Morgan Hill), and drove down to
Morgan Hill with my gear.

I spent part of my shift located out in a church parking lot (where a
major road comes down from the hillside residential neighborhoods)
with a sign and cone, ready to call in for help (relieving one of
Morgan Hill's operators who'd been on-shift since dawn), and part in a
CAL Fire station acting as a communications liason to the EOC.

It was a good experience in most regards for the hams. Fortunately,
we didn't encounter any actual life-threatening incidents which
required our services in the moment.

I asked our DEC whether he had any sort of post-incident report in his
files, and he did... and has given me the OK to post it for anyone
interested:

http://www.radagast.org/~dplatt/hamr...tionReport.pdf

And course, there's the liability issue. Hypothetically, how
many lawyers would be involved if just one amateur dropped the
ball? Or even if they did everything right, and something bad
happened anyway.

When activated, we are covered by the same governmental immunity that
public safety personnel are. The old "Western Union" rule applies -
we are obligated to receive the traffic with no guarantee of eventual
delivery. In plain language - you get what you get.

Yup.

In our county, we're signed up as California Disaster Service
Workers... so, when formally activated, we become (in effect) unpaid
employees of the activating government body (city or county), covered
under Workman's Compensation for injuries, and protected by some
limited liability coverage. The coverage only applies as long as
we're properly trained, working within the scope of our training,
properly "activated" for the incident by a government official with
authority to do so, and are properly tracked and supervised during our
deployment (and travel to and fro). The whole county MAC program
here, is about making sure that the ham volunteers *are* properly
trained, and that records of the training are kept, so that the
volunteers can be deployed in ways which don't step outside the "you
are protected" conditions.

These protections would *not* apply to us (or anyone else including
random ham volunteers) who just "jump in" on our own initiative.
We're under strict instructions not to "self-activate", but to wait
for us to be activated by the proper authority. Otherwise, it's like
the preacher said in Blazing Saddles: "Son, you're on your own!"

These protections will *not* keep us (or anyone) from being sued by
J. Miffed Citizen, but they should help get the case dismissed, or at
least properly defended by the activating government body.

[Foxs Mercantile]

On 11/3/2014 5:25 PM, David Platt wrote:
[A bit late in chiming in here, but it took a while to locate the
document I was hoping for.]

And a big thank you for doing so.

We had a vaguely similar incident here back in 2009, when some
effectively-targeted vandalism knocked out almost all phone service in
large parts of several counties in my area, during the wee hours of
4/9/2009. Land-line and cell calls were both affected, including
almost all 9-1-1 service. It took most of the day to restore a
substantial amount of the disrupted service.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/articl...ce-3245380.php

Fortunately nobody died (as far as I know) as a result of being [not ]
able to call 9-1-1 for medical or fire or police emergencies. It could
easily have been otherwise.

Ham-radio responders were activated by the city and county RACES
organizations, to provide liason communication between public safety
organizations and hospitals, and to serve as points of contact for the
public in case of emergencies.

It was a good experience in most regards for the hams. Fortunately,
we didn't encounter any actual life-threatening incidents which
required our services in the moment.

So it took roughly 5 hours for the Amateurs to respond after the initial
incident? And you got a total of 43 people.

I asked our DEC whether he had any sort of post-incident report in his
files, and he did... and has given me the OK to post it for anyone
interested:

http://www.radagast.org/~dplatt/hamr...tionReport.pdf

An excellent report.

In our county, we're signed up as California Disaster Service
Workers... so, when formally activated, we become (in effect) unpaid
employees of the activating government body (city or county), covered
under Workman's Compensation for injuries, and protected by some
limited liability coverage.

These protections would *not* apply to us (or anyone else including
random ham volunteers) who just "jump in" on our own initiative.

Although I have to wonder if the people in charge are fully aware of
their lack of liability in calling us. And if they would tend to
ignore us in the effort of "playing it safe."

--
Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi
http://www.foxsmercantile.com

[David Platt]

In article ,
Foxs Mercantile wrote:

In our county, we're signed up as California Disaster Service
Workers... so, when formally activated, we become (in effect) unpaid
employees of the activating government body (city or county), covered
under Workman's Compensation for injuries, and protected by some
limited liability coverage.

These protections would *not* apply to us (or anyone else including
random ham volunteers) who just "jump in" on our own initiative.

Although I have to wonder if the people in charge are fully aware of
their lack of liability in calling us. And if they would tend to
ignore us in the effort of "playing it safe."

I can't say for sure about how much the whole Government safety
hierarchy knows about the situation... lots of people there, not many
are all that familiar with amateur radio or with the Disaster Service
Worker rules.

What I can say is that the "contact people" we work with fairly
directly (in my city and county) seem to be very well informed. In my
city we have an excellent relationship between the ARES/RACES group,
and the relevant city government department. The "sponsoring
official" is the city's Emergency Manager. He's the one who has to
sign an activation authorization (or formally delegate the right to do
so in an emergency), and I know that he and our RACES Emergency
Coordinator have had many discussions about the terms of activation,
the DSW coverage, and so forth. He knows he's taking on liability
whenever he signs an activation (even one for training purposes).

One of the big reasons we have developed a formalized training program
here, is that the city/county government people *are* aware that
they're taking on some legal liability/responsibility for us when they
activate us... and they need to be comfortable with the fact that
they're doing so. They really don't want "loose cannons" on the
roster... i.e. "volunteers" would would jump into a dangerous
situation, get in over their head (well beyond their training) and
cause further problems, or suffer an expensive injury (or injure
someone else) for which the city or county would then be liable.

That's one reason for the MAC (Mutual Aid Communicator) program we
have. The city ECs will not release a ham for service outside his/her
sponsoring city (in effect, transferring responsibility and liability
to the county or to another city) unless the ham has been
MAC-qualified, which requires taking several training courses and
having a more senior MAC "evaluator" sign off on the ham's training
and equipment. Ham responders who haven't gone through this formal
certification program may be activated for in-city emergencies, but
will be generally be "paired up" with a more senior operator.
"Convergent volunteer" hams who just show up with a radio and try to
jump in and help, with no training and no familiarity with local
operating procedures... well, they'll probably be sent down to the
city volunteer center with all the other spontaneous volunteers, and
probably won't be activated as ham DSWs for anything other than
closely-supervised operation "in the shack".

It's taken years of work, but at this point, the emergency managers in
a lot of the cities in our county do consider the RACES hams to be a
valuable city resource, and don't want to have them all run off to
another location. It took some discussion and negotiation to get them
to agree that the RACES EC (who is typically not a city employee)
could have permission to release one or two MACs for service elsewhere
in an emergency, without a specific "OK, we don't need them here"
goahead from the city Emergency Manager.

One of the biggest perceived benefits we've been able to offer the
cities, is the fact that we can mobilize a lot of "eyes and ears" very
quickly, and get situation reports back to the EOC much faster than if
the cities had to send out police and fire staff. In a real disaster
(e.g. a M6+ earthquake) the paid public-safety staff is going to be
200% busy handling specific emergencies, and won't have time to gather
overall situation information. We've demonstrated that we can get a
boatload of "walking survey" and "windshield survey" information back
to the EOC, by the time the Emergency Manager arrives... give the EM a
sense for where the city's public safety and disaster control staff
can be most effectively deployed... and then "activate" some of those
hams to serve as communication liasons with public safety, Red Cross
and other shelter locations, and so forth.

Our county program information is at

http://www.scc-ares-races.org/