[QCWA] Fw: [DX-CHAT] VU4 Harpole Interview

[Norm Gertz]

Subject: [DX-CHAT] VU4 Harpole Interview


> UCF professor survives, relays messages to world
> 
> 
> The earthquake hit with the popping of concrete, screeching of twisting 
> metal and the thudding sounds of bottles, books and bits of plaster 
> falling from the shelves and walls of Charles Harpole's hotel room.
> 
> "I knew that I'd either be dead in a few seconds because the building 
> would crash down or I'd get out and be fine," the vacationing University 
> of Central Florida professor said early Friday. "There was that sense of 
> finality."
> 
> Harpole and other members of a ham-radio club were just north of the 
> quake's epicenter on the picturesque Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the 
> Bay of Bengal between India and Thailand.
> 
> It was 6:30 a.m. Sunday, when Harpole was shaken from his bed to 
> discover the walls of his room shaking and the floor turned to jelly.
> 
> "I was on the fifth floor, and it was difficult to walk because the 
> floor was shifting. It was either too high or too low," he said in a 
> telephone interview from the home of his wife's family in Samut Sakhon, 
> Thailand.
> 
> Harpole said he knew the safest place to be was beneath a doorway, so he 
> made his way to the bathroom doorway and held on for what seemed like 
> six or seven minutes of shaking in the 9.0-magnitude earthquake.
> 
> When things finally settled, Harpole got dressed and fled the building, 
> discovering to his joy that everyone in his party has escaped uninjured.
> 
> Because their hotel was on a high mountain ridge, Harpole said, it 
> wasn't affected by the tsunami. But as he and his team realized the 
> scope of the disaster, they set up their radio equipment and started 
> relaying messages.
> 
> For about 20 hours, the ham operators -- sometimes using car batteries 
> to run their radios -- were the main link between the remote Andaman and 
> Nicobar Islands and the outside world, relaying information about 
> survivors to anxious relatives and friends.
> 
> And with most telephone lines down and cell phones scarce, the ham-radio 
> club's efforts proved invaluable as the scope of the disaster increased 
> day after day.
> 
> The first messages were to let people on the Indian mainland know that 
> those on the island were safe and unharmed.
> 
> A young waiter at Harpole's hotel asked them to get word to his mother 
> in Hyderabad, India, that he was alive and well.
> 
> "We found a ham-radio operator on the mainland, gave the mother's 
> telephone number," Harpole said. Within five minutes a ham operator in 
> Hyderabad called the waiter's mother and relayed the message.
> 
> "He told us the mother was crying with joy," he said.
> 
> Harpole's group cheered and clapped. Word spread quickly across the 
> island, and their work went on for hours and hours.
> 
> When Indian government officials learned of the hamradio operators, they 
> relayed messages for official requests for medicines, water and 
> blankets. Several of the radio operators headed south to Nicobar.
> 
> Harpole decided it was time for him to head to Thailand for a reunion 
> with his wife and her family who were safely inland.
> 
> "I was concerned, that this being an Indian operation and here I was 
> this American, I should step aside," he said.
> 
> At his in-laws' house, he had his own radio equipment and has been 
> relaying messages throughout Thailand, India and Sri Lanka.
> 
> "People are asking, 'Can you find so-and-so,' and so forth," he said.
> 
> Harpole, an amateur-radio enthusiast since he was 14, had been working 
> for years with fellow enthusiasts in India to get permission to set up a 
> station on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which consist of 572 
> islands, big and small, inhabited and uninhabited.
> 
> Amateur-radio buffs collect calls from geographic zones, trying to reach 
> remote parts of the world and put pins in maps to mark the locations. 
> But because of the Indian government's concern for security, a swath of 
> the globe had been off-limits until Harpole and his friends persuaded 
> the leaders to lift the ban.
> 
> About two weeks ago, Harpole and his friends arrived in the harbor town 
> of Port Blair to set up the first ham-radio station and lounge on the 
> tropical, white, sandy beaches.
> 
> It was an idyllic holiday until the quake hit.
> 
> Harpole, who founded the film program at UCF, expects to be back in 
> Orlando soon. He said that the devastation throughout the Indian Ocean 
> rim is hard to comprehend. The full toll may never be known. That's 
> because many rural island and coastal villages never had a census, and 
> "for some of those places, there isn't anyone left alive to say how many 
> people had lived there," he said.
> 
> "Many islands were washed completely over from one side to the other. 
> I've seen horrible, horrible destruction," Harpole said. "It's shocking 
> beyond the telling. Piles of cars, broken buildings and boats where 
> there used to be towns and people. The stories from people being hit by 
> the wave -- so unexpected. People having coffee, and then they're gone."
> 
> Christopher Sherman of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report. 
> Rich McKay can be reached at 407-420-5470 or rmckay at orlandosentinel.com.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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