[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.