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

Fri Jun 29 23:44:30 EDT 2012

I think you have almost enough for a really good magazine(QST?) article,
Jon.

The way I see it, the infrastructure has grown larger than a single
operator can comprehend -- from a single spark transmitter/crystal receiver
to an Echolink connected , trunk line, if you will.  However small the
individual operator becomes relative to the overall structure, though, he
remains indispensable.  With expanding, dynamic, ad-hoc, connections  set
up to meet emergency(or just fluctuating) conditions; it will take smart
operators, programmers, and communicators to obtain optimum results under
adverse conditions.

CERT will certainly need effective phone communicators, but the ability to
locate and communicate on a variety of channels gives most  ham operators a
significant edge.

(I would guess Betsy understands.)

          Regards,

                         -Tom Y.

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Jon Perelstein <jon.perelstein at gmail.com>wrote:

> >> 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
> ______________________________________________________________
> CTSARA mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/ctsara
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:CTSARA at mailman.qth.net
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
>

-- 
In the new era, thought itself will be transmitted by radio.
 — Guglielmo Marconi