[HIham] Just another day for hams ...

[Jeffrey Herman]

Gang,

Below is a good PR article from the NY Times regarding how amateurs
assisted during the East Coast blackout.

Keep your batteries charged!

Jeff KH6O


Operations Specialist    Mathematics Lecturer
U.S. Coast Guard         University of Hawaii System

--------------------------------------------------------------

August 19, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Filed at 1:57 p.m. ET

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- When technology failed on a massive
scale last week, some old-fashioned broadcasting stepped
into the breach as ham radio operators took to the airwaves
to reach emergency workers.

For millions of people in the Northeast and Midwest, the
Aug. 14 outage took access to e-mail and the Internet with
it. Landline and cellular telephones were jammed by a crush
of calls.

But the ham radio, which came into being in the World War I
era, connected firefighters and police departments, Red
Cross workers and other emergency personnel during the most
extensive blackout in the Northeast since 1977.

Ham operators are not dependent on a server or cell tower,
and with battery backups can operate when grids can't.

``When everything else fails, the ham radio is still
there,'' said Allen Pitts, a ham operator in New Britain.
``You can't knock out that system.''

The radios are operated by a network of volunteers
organized by the Newington-based American Radio Relay
League.

Ham radio's importance won renewed recognition after the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. ARRL won a federal Homeland
Security grant of nearly $182,000 to train amateur radio
operators in emergency operations to help during terrorist
attacks.

``It's incredible the differences you're seeing, the large
cadre of people who know what they're doing,'' Pitts said.
``It's making a major difference.''

Tom Carrubba, a coordinator for ARRL in New York City's
five boroughs and two counties on Long Island, said
volunteers went to work immediately after power went down
Thursday afternoon.

``In five minutes guys were on the air with the Red Cross
and Office of Emergency Management,'' he said.

During other disasters, such as severe weather, ARRL
volunteers and coordinators activate telephone trees,
Carrubba said. On Thursday, they instead hit their assigned
frequency or staffed an emergency operations center.

In the New York-Long Island region, with a population of
nearly 10 million, about 100 ham radio operators handled
the situation, Carrubba said. Some volunteers headed to a
Red Cross headquarters or shelter, fire department, or
hospital, he said. One hospital was temporarily out of
power and ARRL volunteers provided communications to
ambulances until electricity was restored.

Carrubba estimated that operators handled 800 to 1,000
communications from Thursday afternoon until early Friday.