Emergency Communications and You

Training tip for 4-19-06

At last week’s ARES meeting, a show of hands indicated that most of you have not been exposed to the ARRL Emergency Communications Online Course material. It’s important that you do so, and in order to accomplish this in a painless and convenient way, we’re going to devote most of the training tips for the next few months to covering this material.

So just what is a communications emergency? It’s when a critical communications system failure puts the public at risk. Lots of different circumstances can damage conventional communications systems, or overload them to the point that they’re useless. Severe storms and violent earthquakes, for example, can knock out phone lines, cell towers, police radio towers, or electrical service to those systems. Cell phone systems are designed to handle perhaps 10% of subscribers at any one time, but in an emergency, even when the system is fully functional, it can quickly get overloaded and emergency calls can’t get through. Even in normal circumstances, communications can fail. Underground cables can accidentally get found by the business end of a back-hoe. Hospital and 911 phone systems can fail. And emergencies can occur where there is no cell phone service, such as in backcountry searches and wildfires.

So where do you fit in?

Emergency communications, or “emcomm” volunteers come from a wide variety of backgrounds, range of skills, and experience. What they have in common is a desire and enthusiasm for helping others, with no gain or glory in mind. They are willing to work as a team player and take direction from served agencies and emergency coordinators (EC’s) and Assistant EC’s. They need to be able to think and act quickly under stress. And they need to have a “can do” attitude.

Hams have been an emergency communications resource from the very beginning of the hobby. We have the equipment, the skills, and the spectrum necessary to fulfill the role of providing emcomm, even under poor conditions. We are licensed and pre-authorized for national and international communications. We can expand our network capacity almost instantly to encompass a wider geographic area or relay messages around the earth to take advantage of propagation vagaries. Commercial and public safety communications systems can’t begin to do that.

However, just having those qualifications is not sufficient to get the job done professionally. Some emergency communications skills are very different from what you use in your daily ham radio life. Traffic handling and passing formal messages, for instance, unless you do it everyday, may be strange and foreign to you at first. Or if you haven’t done it in a long time, you might be rusty. We’ll cover that in later training tips. For now, just recognize that without that skill, for example, your effectiveness is limited.

You also need to recognize what you’re not expected to be. You are NOT a first responder. You will almost never be the first on the scene. You don’t need flashing lights and sirens on your vehicle. In fact, at the beginning of an emergency, you’ll usually not be of much use. It’s only after a while, when authorities and the general public learn about the extent of an emergency, that communications systems fail to be able to handle the traffic or get overloaded. Then the hams are called in to assist.

You are not in charge. You have no authority to make decisions or make demands on any served agency. The only decisions you can make are whether to participate or not (you are, after all, a volunteer), and decisions affecting your own health and safety. If you decide to participate you do so under the terms of the served agency. You are there to fulfill THEIR communication needs and to comply with THEIR commands.

Recognize that you cannot do everything. When an agency you’re serving runs short of medical help, shelter managers, or police assistance, you cannot jump in if you’re not trained and qualified for the task. You can certainly provide assistance when you know what you’re doing, however, and help out with tasks of which communication is an integral part.

That’s tonight’s training tip. Next time we’ll explore the nature of emcomm a little deeper.