[WIham] FEMA Administrator Calls Amateur Radio “The Last Line of Defense”

[Mark Thompson]

http://www.arrl.org/news/fema-administrator-calls-amateur-radio-the-last-line-of-defense


05/25/2011
In an FCC forum on earthquake communications preparedness, Federal Emergency 
Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate described the  Amateur Radio 
operator as “the ultimate backup, the originators of what we call social media.” 
The forum-- held May 3 at FCC Headquarters in Washington, DC -- brought together 
officials from the White House, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the 
United States Geological Survey (USGS), FEMA, the FCC and the private sector. 
Fugate and FCC Bureau of Public Safety and Homeland Security Chief Jamie Barnett 
gave the opening remarks.
Later in the forum, Fugate spoke more on Amateur Radio. “During the initial 
communications out of Haiti, volunteers using assigned frequencies that they are 
allocated, their own equipment, their own money, nobody pays them, were the 
first ones oftentimes getting word out in the critical first hours and first 
days as the rest of the systems came back up,” he told the forum. “I think that 
there is a tendency because we have done so much to build infrastructure and 
resiliency in all our other systems, we have tended to dismiss that role ‘When 
Everything Else Fails.’ Amateur Radio oftentimes is our last line of defense.”
Fugate said that he thinks “we get so sophisticated and we have gotten so used 
to the reliability and resilience in our wireless and wired and our broadcast 
industry and all of our public safety communications, that we can never fathom 
that they’ll fail. They do. They have. They will. I think a strong Amateur Radio 
community [needs to be] plugged into these plans. Yes, most of the time they’re 
going be bored, because a lot of the time, there’s not a lot they’re going to be 
doing that other people aren’t doing with Twitter and Facebook and everything 
else. But when you need Amateur Radio, you really need them.”
You can watch a video of the forum on YouTube 
at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzx-kvo1i_Y  Fugate’s remarks begin at 18:55.