On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:27:41 EDT, Steve Bonine wrote:

Hurricane Katrina illustrated the frailty of
modern communications, but it also illustrated how things have changed
in the role of ham radio in disasters. We no longer are a significant
carrier of health and welfare traffic.

Or a backup for public safety or other "commercial" communications.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net

In article ,
Phil Kane wrote:

Hurricane Katrina illustrated the frailty of
modern communications, but it also illustrated how things have changed
in the role of ham radio in disasters. We no longer are a significant
carrier of health and welfare traffic.

Or a backup for public safety or other "commercial" communications.

I think that depends, to a very significant degree, on how well
organized and trained we are, and how well integrated with the local
emergency-response community.

A randomly-selected gang of hams, with their radios but with no
specific tranining or organization or ability to work as a group, is
not likely (in my opinion) to be very useful in times of emergency.
They won't know how to figure out what the local governments need in
terms of emergency communications, they won't know where to go or who
to talk with, they won't be set up with any sort of predictable
communications plan in advance, etc.

If they show up at the location of a disaster or emergency, they'll
probably be treated as "loose cannons" by the police, fire department,
other government representatives, etc. and asked to go away and let
the professionals do their job. At best they'll be treated like any
other "convergent volunteers" of unknown capability and reliability.

On the other hand... I believe that local ham groups, if well
organized and trained, working in close cooperation with local
governments and emergency-response teams, can be a very valuable
asset, and see as such by government organizations.

I have the good fortune to live in a city (and county) which has some
very effective arrangements of that sort. We *have* been called out
by the county on at least one occasion in the past few years, to serve
as backup communicators for the police/fire infrastructure (somebody
sabotaged several fiber-optic cables and knocked out all of the
telephones and cellphones in south Santa Clara County back in 2009).
I still have a very nice thank-you letter from the city manager of
Morgan Hill.

One area in which our service has been particularly useful to the
cities is our ability to act as "eyes and ears" during the first few
hours after a disaster. We can provide the city emergency manager
with a quick overview of damage (e.g. after an earthquake, or during a
winter storm with flooding) throughout the city, within 15 minutes or
so, via neighborhood walkthroughs and "windshield survey" drive-by
summaries. This helps the city figure out where their (strictly
limited) police and fire resources are best utilized. It would take
the city hours, if not days, to do this just with their own
personnel... and the city governments view this as a very valuable
service for us to provide.

If hams want to be treated as being worthy of some special treatment,
then I believe that this must be earned, through practical
demonstration and through active cooperation and training. It *can*
be done, but it doesn't come for free.

It's not the "ham radio" per se that's important (although the
privileges are very useful)... it's the fact that we're trained,
dependable communicators willing to serve.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

On 10/24/11 3:39 PM, Dave Platt wrote:
In ,
Phil wrote:

Hurricane Katrina illustrated the frailty of
modern communications, but it also illustrated how things have changed
in the role of ham radio in disasters. We no longer are a significant
carrier of health and welfare traffic.

Or a backup for public safety or other "commercial" communications.

I think that depends, to a very significant degree, on how well
organized and trained we are, and how well integrated with the local
emergency-response community.

Agree completely. The "well integrated" part is especially important.
The relationships must be forged before the event.

I have the good fortune to live in a city (and county) which has some
very effective arrangements of that sort.

And I have the bad fortune to live in an area where the situation is
exactly the opposite. Perhaps I should be able to remedy this
situation, and I tried for a while but failed. I do not know whether
that failure is a result of my shortcomings, the local ham population,
or both.

We *have* been called out
by the county on at least one occasion in the past few years,

Our local emergency management people made a valiant effort to work with
the local radio club for several years, even to the point of holding
fundraisers to finance the local repeaters. Their thanks for that was a
failure to install the purchased gear and a lack of response when the
local club was called upon to assist with communications related to a
search operation. They learned; we taught them.

If hams want to be treated as being worthy of some special treatment,
then I believe that this must be earned, through practical
demonstration and through active cooperation and training. It *can*
be done, but it doesn't come for free.

Exactly. It takes good organizers and people who care. We are missing
one or both of those in this geographic area.

It's not the "ham radio" per se that's important (although the
privileges are very useful)... it's the fact that we're trained,
dependable communicators willing to serve.

One of the problems with the locals is that they expected exactly the
special treatment that they had not earned, acting like prima donnas.
They made it excruciatingly clear that the only task they would consider
was pure communications, and that it would be done on their terms.

73, Steve KB9X

In article , Steve Bonine wrote:

One of the problems with the locals is that they expected exactly the
special treatment that they had not earned, acting like prima donnas.

That's not good, and I agree that it's a problem. That sort of
attitude can certainly generate some serious negative reactions on the
part of the full-time emergency response officials.

They made it excruciatingly clear that the only task they would consider
was pure communications, and that it would be done on their terms.

Well, in our training, we have been told that communications is all
we're supposed to do, when we're deployed. This is for two reasons:

(1) We may be the only effective communicators at a particular
location... that's what we're deployed to do. If we're asked to
(e.g.) direct traffic, we're not communicating, and not doing our
jobs.

[On the other hand, "communicator" is a very broad term. If we're
not needed 'on the air' we can be asked to carry messages back
and forth in person, or use the phone, or fax, or etc., or to
take a public-service radio rather than a ham radio... this is
all within our job scope.]

(2) We're covered under the California Disaster Service Worker program,
which gives us some liability protection and worker's-comp
coverage if we're injured (as I mentioned). The rules for this
program say that we're covered *only* when we're acting within the
scope of our assignment and within the scope of our training, and
are properly supervised.

If we start doing jobs for which we are not properly trained,
we're not covered, and are potentially liable for any damage or
harm that we do. If we go off on our own and are out of contact
with our supervisors (city or county), then we're not covered
(with the exception that a direct order from a sworn law
enforcement official takes priority).

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:39:32 EDT, (Dave Platt)
wrote:

We no longer are a significant carrier of health and welfare traffic.

Or a backup for public safety or other "commercial" communications.

I think that depends, to a very significant degree, on how well
organized and trained we are, and how well integrated with the local
emergency-response community.

I walk on both sides of the street on that one.

As an active member of the local ARES/RACES group, we are well
integrated with the state, county, city, and special district
governmental agencies and we train seriously for that purpose. I
personally am the co-station manager for the Disaster Communications
Team of the local med center, part of a group of NGO hospitals serving
this area.

Conversely, I am the VP-General Counsel and Engineering Manager of a
major consulting engineering firm specializing in public safety
communications. Our clients include major governmental agencies which
are heavily invested in redundancy and survivability of their own
systems to the point where they will not have to rely on outside
resources. We don't sell, install, or recommend equipment - we just
design and evaluate their systems and handle all the regulatory
process involved.

I'm just telling it as it is.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net

On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:39:32 EDT, (Dave Platt)
wrote:

I have the good fortune to live in a city (and county) which has some
very effective arrangements of that sort. We *have* been called out
by the county on at least one occasion in the past few years, to serve
as backup communicators for the police/fire infrastructure (somebody
sabotaged several fiber-optic cables and knocked out all of the
telephones and cellphones in south Santa Clara County back in 2009).
I still have a very nice thank-you letter from the city manager of
Morgan Hill.

My ARES/RACES group also has a good relationship with our county.
I live in Nye County, NV, third largest county area-wise in the
contiguous USA (18,159 square miles, larger than a couple of US
states), but with very low population (43,946). Our ARES/RACES group
is well integrated with the county Emergency Management Department.
And we have proven our worth: A few winters ago in January, our
largest town Pahrump (pop: 36,441) experienced a town-wide electric
outage that lasted for over 12 hours after some hunters shot down the
main transmission line into town. The communications systems of the
sheriff, fire department, and even the electric company ran on AC
power with no backup. ARES was asked to step in. We shadowed
officials and manned emergency shelters using our battery- and
solar-powered radios and repeater to reestablish communications.

In other joint exercises, we have shown that we could get a message
through when they couldn't.

The county even buys us radio equipment. Three VHF/UHF and one HF
transceivers along with antennas at the main Emergency Operations
Center (EOC) in Pahrump, as well as in 2 other smaller towns. Our two
mountain-top repeaters are located in the county's equipment shelters
and use their towers.

They let us use the training room in the EOC for our meetings and
training. And we do train regularly. We also hold our Amateur radio
exam sessions in that room. The ARES Emergency Coordinator and his
assistant have keys to the building.

And, getting back to our original topic of HOAs and CC&Rs, most of our
the developments are free of any restrictions on ham antennas. Mostly,
they just deal with set-backs and minimum size of structures. Another
good reason to live in a rural community!

Dick Grady, AC7EL

On Oct 24, 2:37 pm, Phil Kane wrote:
On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:27:41 EDT, Steve Bonine wrote:
Hurricane Katrina illustrated the frailty of
modern communications, but it also illustrated how things have changed
in the role of ham radio in disasters. We no longer are a significant
carrier of health and welfare traffic.

Or a backup for public safety or other "commercial" communications.

(The following, while just opinion, is probably a major heresy.)

And that minor role is just fine. in the last ten years or so, there
has been a major attempt to mutate amateur radio into some sort of
official adjunct to emergency communications.

And let's just say it has had mixed success. We were looking at
background checks, including financial. While the financial part was
dropped, it surely set the tone. The emergency types came in fast and
hard, and they had no illusions that Amateur Radio was anything else
but emergency ops - and if grudging acceptance was afforded,
acknowledged that some Hams messed with unimportant stuff like
contesting, DX, ane electronic design. But they "knew" exactly what
Ham radio was for, and I always caught the undercurrent that they
thought most of us were a bit foolish. We still get a lot of that in
the discourse. I sat at meetings where some guy from some emergency
outfit comes in and tells us that since by nature, everything they do
is a matter of life and death, therefore it's always an emergency,
that they have unrestricted priority over our repeater system.
Basically that our repeater system was now theirs. He was wrong of
course, but that's my point. There are people out there who think that
way.

A local Ham wastrying for a radio check to see if his HT was making
it into one of our repeater satellite voting relays a few weeks ago.
One of the emergency Op types came back to him, and told him he was
coming in okay. Then the testing Ham moved, and his signal got a
little scratchy. The EO guy noted the dropoff in clarity, the testing
Ham said that it was just his HT he had in case of emergencies. Well,
that started the ball rolling. The Emergency guy starts to deliver a 5
minute lecture to the other Ham about how people shouldn't be using
HT's for much of anything. The testing Ham noted that he already had a
sufficiently powerful setup. But the Emergency Op wasn't done yet. He
went on another tirade noting that although he'd only been a Ham for a
very short time, his job was to show other Hams that they were
technically pretty backwards, and even the older Hams, because it was
his "experience" that older Hams just didnn't keep up. He ended with
some bizarre comment about how he thinks that his pointing out other
peoples shortcomings makes the world a better place. I thought I'd
have a little fun with him. I called in, and noted that it was good to
have a technically astute Ham on the air, then tried to involve him in
a discussion of the technical aspects of our repeater. Turned out the
limits of his techical abilities were to get a 50 watt radio, put up a
J-Pole, and mash the PTT button. But we can compre anecdotes all day.

Then emergency employees were getting technician licenses as an end-
around to get employees using the radio instead of volunteers.
Unfortunately, many of the employees thought that the amateur
frequencies were a sort of back channel for their use. Many were
disappointed to find that we had some rules and restrictions.

As far as I am concerned, the role of Hams in an emergency situation
is that if there is a Ham in the area where the disaster is, he or she
might use their station to relay messages into areas that might be
coordinating help. That's enough.

The idea that we provide someone to fill a seat at an EC is sort of
illogical anyhow. Why would the EC not have a trained professional in
that seat? Are all the others there unpaid volunteers? If I were
running one of these places, I'd have someone filling that seat that I
was a supervisor over.