All very good questions. I am planning on attending the next town council meet to see how some of the concerns are addressed.
1. the Town of Skiatook provides and services the electric in the city limits. that's a whole rant in it's self. it seems like the power goes out on average 3 times a month do to decrepit equipment and the lack of maintenance in the last 10 years. the police dept is listed as the after hours number for the electric, water, and street depts. and is responsible for dispatching them after hours.
j: That's just WRONG. But it does answer my (and CommShrek's) question.
2. as far as I know, there is no Standard Operating Procedure for activation of the Tulsa EMA EOC or RACES. I have worked there a little over 2 months and don't even know where to begin in the process or who's approval I'd need to get before hand. We even have an active member of the Tulsa Emergency Management that works for us as a police officer.
j: I wasn't speaking of RACES - that takes an "act of God" and is unnecessary in this case. ARES, on the other hand, can be activated with a phone call to anyone in the ham radio ARES "Emergency Coordinator" hierarchy. The District EC lives down by 'Shrek, but the County EC and the Assistant EC - TAEMA liaison both live in Skiatook. All it takes is one call to them, then one call to one of them to put an announcement on any working repeater, and all the hams that are nearby and can hear that repeater are on the way. In fact, if you call TAEMA, there's a couple of hams on their staff, and they can "skip" the call to the EC and let them do it - they'll put the call on the repeater first, because they're likely to get the ARES hierarchy moving faster that way, anyway. BTW, I know that TAEMA/PD - worked with him a couple weeks ago at the Fall Century bike ride. Send me a PM if you want, and I'll get you contact info to get you and these guys together (if you haven't already).
3. I know somewhere in the middle of the cluster last night, KOTV and KJRH called to ask about the power outage. I was too busy to watch the 10 O'clock news so I have no clue if it was even mentioned at all.
j: TV isn't what I was thinking (but do them, too). TV with a crawl, and radio with a 15 second announcement every commercial break. Something to the effect of: "due to the power outage in Skiatook, 911 is down in that area. Persons needing emergency assistance should go to the nearest convenience store, or the PD or FD station. Radio operators are standing by at those locations to relay their call. In fact, if you activate ARES, the newsies are likely to pick it up anyway, since they monitor the ham freqs in their scanners.
4. Like I said before there's no SOP for this kind of situation. I did finally get the EMS and Fire trucks to switch over to our PD side which is simplex so we could communicate until the repeater for Fire was back up. I hope to get some kind of pre-planning done this month should a situation like this occur again. Hopefully this can serve as a wake up call to those who run the town showing them that should a real disaster or emergency occur we are screwed. But then again, with the Board of Trustees track record I wouldn't be surprised if they completely ignore the whole situation.
j: That sounds like an SOP/radio programming problem. Either you program alternate memories with the repeater, then the same freq but as simplex on the output, or you use some designated simplex freqs. It's possible (probably, actually) that the simplex freqs (the M/A ones, at least) are already in the radios - just that there's no SOP to go to them. Unless they're radio buffs as well, the firefighters may not know the difference until someone explains it to them - which means "now's your chance!"
oh, and the battery was dead on the generator. the service crew had it running before I left at 23:00, but of course the power was already restored by then.