[RVRC] The focus on emergency communications/service

[Marvin Bronstein]

Letters: New Focus on the "Served Community"
I appreciate the focus you have been bringing in recent QST articles. I was active in leadership in Palm Beach County (Florida) ARES during our calamitous 2004-2005 hurricane seasons when we activated for four different storms. Based on that experience, we encountered challenges under the then-current ARES model, which focused on served agencies. Staffing was a major issue for us. Based on this experience, I came to the conclusion, further reinforced in the years that followed, that the ham community needed to turn its focus toward their own individual neighborhoods and communities. 

Now, I am more convinced than ever that the future utility of Amateur Radio in public service lies in the individual ham's immediate community - the "served community" as opposed to the traditional served agency model. The public still has little recourse when cell phones stop working. A ham can organize a communications system in his neighborhood, make it known that his is the door to knock on to get a message out, and when an incident happens, he can do what he is most likely to do anyway: hunker down with his family and protect them and his property, instead of being asked to make accommodations to leave all that is precious to him behind to drive through potentially hazardous conditions to a distant service point like an EOC or shelter to serve somebody else's needs. 

Of course, there will always be a need/opportunity for well-equipped, well-trained, well-organized self-sufficient teams of communicators to travel to areas affected by worst-case scenarios, and that should be part of planning efforts, but they should come from operators with personal situations that have been unaffected by the disaster effects. Asking a ham to leave his family and property who are clearly out of harm's way to go help others is much more reasonable and rational than asking him while he and his family are personally affected by the incident. -- John Sheats, WD4V, Loxahatchee, Florida