Bill Sexton AAA9PC/N1IN
Posted: 17 NOV 04
What do combat infantrymen and MARS members have in common? Before they go into action, they drill and drill and drill.
Of course, the troops and Hams also share the reality that no amount of drill fully prepares you for the real thing-as this Ham was reminded recently.
The occasion was a sort of amateur radio equivalent of a U.S. Army live fire exercise: as realistic as you can make it short of war.
Like cities and counties across the country from time to time, Pittsfield, MA mobilized all police, fire, Emergency Management and other support agencies one April day to deal with a (mock) terrorist. An electricity generating plant came under attack and toxic gases were released from the plant's chemical storage area.
The exercise was complete with gun battle, toxic plume, school evacuation, extrication of several dozen injured civilians and the decontamination of many. It made for great pictures in the next day's newspaper-which is to say it really was realistic.
Especially for this amateur.
In Pittsfield, Hams and other citizen-volunteers drill every month at the command center in Emergency Management headquarters, a retired fire station. There's a secure radio room with VHF and HF gear and antennas on the roof, and also a mobile communications van.
Of course we Hams were "up" for this exercise. Like off-duty firemen and police, there had been advance notice. On reporting for duty, I drew the assignment of manning a telephone in the command center, one of four volunteers with this duty.
At the start, our job would be to notify a long list of radio stations, utilities, the bus company, airport, railroad, relief agencies, etc. And there we sat that morning awaiting the official phone call from the mayor's office declaring an emergency.
Just to be safe, I had my emergency-band HT monitoring police and fire traffic with me at the phone bank. More on that later.
As a member of the Army Military Affiliate Radio System, I'd also brought along a flyaway radio kit (MARS parlance for portable station in a suitcase). This was the perfect opportunity for filing emergency information reports that are a primary MARS mission. More on this later, too.
The Mayor's phone call came, and Emergency Management jumped into action. The radio room began logging all traffic on police and fire frequencies as well as monitoring Emergency Management's own net. The phone crew began the public notifications. Two Hams drove the mobile van to the scene, a co-generation plant within a stone's throw of the city's main shopping center, biggest industrial plant, an elementary school and several hundred of residences.
Handling the initial phone list was easy enough. Then came the personal task of preparing the first of a series of EEI messages for MARS. (EEI stands for "Essential Elements of Information," a standardized disaster report used by federal agencies).
And this is where years of writing and sending exercise (fictitious) EEIs from my own shack proved insufficient to the task.
In the middle of a realistic emergency situation-that is, an exercise or actual incident-things just aren't as calm and peaceful as home. Moreover, in preparing reports, you are dependent on others instead of your imagination for exercise messages, and the data is hard to come by. People have more important things to do than respond to an amateur's questions, the more so if they don't know who he or she is, or, for that matter, what MARS is and does.
A line on the EEI form calls for the status of emergency medical facilities. But an operator logging non-stop ambulance transmissions can't stop to tally up totals of transported injured just for you. Nobody at the scene is keeping count, either. And hospital ERs have no time for you, not in the middle of a major incident.
Another line requires a report on local transportation status. On this day the phone number for the railroad (which passes near the scene) connected to an answering machine.
And so on, Murphy all over the place.
For this operator, however, the biggest handicap was purely personal. In an environment of ringing telephones, chattering scanners and constant interruptions, it's not exactly easy to concentrate. That can lead to errors-and in this case, even the simple task of getting the message format straight went awry. This after years of practice.
Well, we're told over and over in Army MARS that an exercise succeeds not when it goes perfectly but when it detects failures in time to fix them.
We certainly found them in this exercise.
For one thing--believe it or not!--the Mayor's office neglected to call Emergency Management at the incident's start. So we were nearly half an hour late notifying the public (via broadcast stations) of the supposed danger to life and limb. Yes, we knew from monitoring the police and fire frequencies that the incident was underway, but we couldn't launch a public response without authorization from the Mayor. EM director Thomas Grizey finally had to phone him to request authorization.
Also, the HF antenna at EM headquarters had become disconnected, so the MARS portable transmitter kit was useless. Fortunately a laptop computer was in the car and I was able to file three EEIs via the Internet (a luxury not necessarily available in a real emergency).
So what's the rush to get EEIs transmitted, anyway? In an actual incident, crucial response decisions depend on timely information. A message delivered the next day isn't much help when the need for help is right now. (That, by the way, is the problem with information copied from a TV newscast: it probably isn't timely, and a MARS member has no way of knowing whether it is accurate, either.)
From this operator's perspective, however, the main lesson was that the routine emergency training within the relative isolation of one's ham shack just doesn't cut it. We all need the experience of collecting data and handling traffic under realistic, i.e., chaotic conditions. There's no substitute for actually being at the center of things, at least once, to get the flavor of a real emergency.
Fortunately, opportunities for that kind of experience arise in almost every community from time to time. Since 09/11 amateurs have been welcome to participate as seldom before.
And despite the embarrassment of having one's under-the-gun errors noticed at MARS headquarters, participation can be fun.
(Bill Sexton is national public awareness coordinator of Army MARS. This column was first published in the August 2004 issue of WorldRadio magazine.)