[CTSARA] An Interesting Three Days With Senior City Police/Fire/SEMS

[Jon Perelstein]

>> Did it give you ideas on where hams might fit in ?

Wellllll ... I don't think that Betsey is going to like this answer, but
I'll answer it anyway.  The short answer is that there is less and less
place for ham radio as we know it, but more and more place for good modern
communicators to fit in.  Among the messages:


1.  Stop focusing on ham radio instead focus on communications

Most of the country (admittedly not all) has sufficient communications
capability and redundancy that there is not going to be much need for pure
ham radio.  That was made especially clear by last August's storms (Irene
and Lee).  As reported in CQ Magazine (Nov 2011 issue) -- all that could be
said was that hams were "on standby monitoring the situation" -- nobody was
able to report the hams doing much of anything useful.  That issue even
reported a major evacuation in Pennsylvania (100,000+ people) carried out
without calling up any ham radio at all.  ARRL proudly trumpeted 30 hams
dispatched to Greene County, NY in the aftermath of Lee, but interestingly
never reported on their activities while there -- the reason being that
there weren't any activities while they were there.  50 or 60 communities
cut off by flood waters, but they all had good alternate communications.
 The Kings County (NY) Repeater Association has an interesting write-up on
their website about the lack of anything for them to do when they sent
people on that deployment.

The City of Stamford loved our (SARA's) participation in Irene because of
our work as communicators, and not because we're hams.  Most of our
communications was by telephone, some by internet, some on Stamford public
service radios, and a little by ham radio.  There was no particular reason
to use ham radio for even that little bit -- the value was Chris's (KB1QXR)
ability to collect and communicate information that the EOC needed.  But
that info could have been communicated via phone, cell phone, internet or
the three public service radios that were at the shelter just as easily as
it could have been communicated via ham radio.

Similarly, the City of Bridgeport loves GBARC because those people have
turned themselves into communicators who have become adept at and are
willing to use all forms of communications.


2.  Join CERT or the local equivalent (e.g., the GBARC people are direct
volunteers to the Bridgeport EOC).

Emergency operations people want their folks to be trained and credentialed
through their organizations so that they know what the people can do and
how they do it.  That is the NIMS standard and more and more localities are
adopting that standard because it works.  It solves big problems for them
and it prevents all kinds of problems that damage the effectiveness of
their responses.  Specialty groups and outsiders can be easily accommodated
when they are trained to the appropriate NIMS standards for their jobs.

Emergency operations people are learning that they don't want to deal with
third-party organizations (not just ARES) because those third-party
organizations have their own standards and their own agendas.  In the
communications arena for example, there are still many places where hams
insist on using NTS message formats instead of the ICS formats that are the
standard for emergency management, and actually translate messages back and
forth because they won't use ICS.  Similarly, it's fairly common to find
different ham radio organizations supporting the same EOC but unable to
communicate with each other because they have each decided to use a
different digital mode (e.g., D-Star, NBEMS, packet, robust packet,
pskMail, Winlink, and Pactor).   Don't laugh -- that's the situation in
southern NJ right now, as well as various areas of Long Island and New York
State.

In addition, by training people to common standards (e.g., CERT), the
emergency people get potential protection from lawsuits, are able to give
the volunteers workman's comp and liability protection, and it becomes much
easier for the localities to obtain expense reimbursements from FEMA since
they can show that their people were properly trained.


3.  Modernize, modernize, modernize.

So here's a scene for you to picture.  A 55 year old 6'2" 225lb 35-year
veteran firefighter (eight of those years being the kind of forest
firefighter who *parachutes* into forest fires) and now a senior FEMA
instructor giggle-snorting Coca-Cola out of his nose.  A 60 yr old former
U.S. Army Colonel (including 10 years in the 82nd Airborne with jumpmaster
status) and now a senior FEMA manager spewing chunks of her sandwich out of
her mouth.

Why?  Because they are both laughing like lunatics.

Why are they both laughing like lunatics?  Because you're telling them
about ARES's on-going obsession with CW.  It's what you get when you give
them the relative message counts for CW NTS versus Voice NTS versus Digital
NTS.

Sorry Betsey, I know you love CW, but to people in emergency management, CW
is an interesting artifact from the early days of radio.  Much as you don't
use Sanskrit or clay tablets,  you don't use CW for modern communications
and you don't use CW for modern emergency communications (unless maybe
those big giant 15 mile wide spaceships from the movie Independence Day
attack the Earth again -- and even then you'd probably use a digital mode
since it would be so much harder for the aliens to detect).  Voice is
tactical -- a firefighter on the front line talking to his/her crew chief
or a truck driver asking for directions to the turnoff.  Anything else is
digital using a mode with good error detection and correction capability so
that you're sure that the message gets to its destination quickly, gets
there as sent, and that neither time nor accuracy is lost in getting it on
paper and/or into a computer where it can do some good.

*****

Emergency management needs people for communications tasks, but they want
it to be their people, properly trained in their way of doing things,
properly integrated into their operations, using a variety of modern
communications methods.  There is a TREMENDOUS amount of information that
needs to be communicated in emergencies (that's what the ICS-300 course is
all about).  It's not John Wayne jumping into a fire truck and
single-handedly putting out a 500,000 acre forest fire.  The information
has to be communicated in a highly accurate, highly reliable way using
people who know how to communicate.  We as hams can do a lot of that
communications work, but we have to learn to do communications and not just
ham radio, we have to learn to do it their way, and we have to learn to do
it as part of their organization.  And oh by the way, we have to learn to
read the briefing material so that when it says bring a rig that can be
moved into an event's SAG wagon, people don't come with rigs that can't be
moved out of their cars.  Similarly, when the briefing material says that
there are two rest stops (Joel Barlow and Westport), we don't make calls to
Rest Stop 1 or Rest Stop 2 or Rest Stop 3.  And if the briefing material
says use the New Canaan repeater, we don't waste an hour calling on the
Stamford repeater.

Jon