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/