Amateur radio disaster preparedness in action

[OkieBoyKJ5JFG]

The night before last, Ada Oklahoma got hammered badly by storms. They have an active amateur radio club with a repeater that I can hear and sometimes even use on a good day. It was very interesting to hear them reporting the action in real time, routing volunteers to areas that had just been hit, doing "damage triage" to help decide who needed help most urgently, etc. Radio is greatly superior to other forms of communication for that purpose because the word gets out to hundreds or potentially even thousands of people all at once. Obviously, there's always the potential for some bonehead to screw stuff up by getting on the repeater with extraneous traffic, but I didn't hear any of that. The local club has obviously practiced this; they ran very smoothly. I was impressed. As best I could tell, at least one county deputy and one member of the local EMS are licensees who were passing information in both directions.

 

[trentbob]

The night before last, Ada Oklahoma got hammered badly by storms. They have an active amateur radio club with a repeater that I can hear and sometimes even use on a good day. It was very interesting to hear them reporting the action in real time, routing volunteers to areas that had just been hit, doing "damage triage" to help decide who needed help most urgently, etc. Radio is greatly superior to other forms of communication for that purpose because the word gets out to hundreds or potentially even thousands of people all at once. Obviously, there's always the potential for some bonehead to screw stuff up by getting on the repeater with extraneous traffic, but I didn't hear any of that. The local club has obviously practiced this; they ran very smoothly. I was impressed. As best I could tell, at least one county deputy and one member of the local EMS are licensees who were passing information in both directions.

Sounds like a good response from that local Club.. 911 calls will be coming in with serious damage, even a 4.5 earthquake can be the same way.

Good to see guys actually get out there. There's many threads on this topic but it's nice to see a club ready and organized to contribute.

If you're lucky enough to have police, and listen to your fire radio on the scanner you'll get a lot of information also as multiple callers will report damage.

Just want to say that in my club, Warminster amateur radio club in Pennsylvania, the only time anybody wears a yellow vest is the annual hamfest we have at the Bucks County Community College Annex in Bristol PA.. in May. Just so they can direct the large amount of traffic😄.

 

[OkieBoyKJ5JFG]

Just want to say that in my club, Warminster amateur radio club in Pennsylvania, the only time anybody wears a yellow vest is the annual hamfest we have at the Bucks County Community College Annex in Bristol PA.. in May. Just so they can direct the large amount of traffic😄.

As far as I could tell, they mostly weren't actually out on the ground. I certainly didn't get the impression that they were following the storm around. They appeared to be acting as a sort of "clearing house" for information. There were a number of reports of, "Hey, my neighborhood is in bad shape", "The warehouse across the highway from me has lost its roof", etc. It was basically having a few dozen eyes with the capability to report instantly to someone who would pass the information along to the appropriate agencies. By "routing volunteers" I meant passing information to the people who were formally assisting the emergency services. Darned good thing to have when it works.