In the May 2010 issue, Emergency Management has published an article on amateur radio. Titled “A Critical Link: Amateur radio operators fill communication gaps and provide situational awareness to emergency managers during and after disasters,” it’s very complimentary to amateur radio. The article is not on the website, per se, but rather it’s part of the digital edition of the magazine (page 58).
The article covers material that most hams already know, but it may be beneficial to pass it on to the emergency managers that you’re currently working with. This is especially true if they’re not completely sold on the advantages of amateur radio. It covers three or four situations where amateur radio was truly “a critical link.”
For example, the article describes how amateurs supported emergence efforts during the “Great Coastal Gale of 2007” in Oregon:
In Oregon, about 1,800 RACES volunteers are authorized to work in state and county EOCs facilitating communication during disasters. For example, during the Great Coastal Gale of 2007 that knocked out communications to the state’s Columbia, Clatsop and Tillamook counties, ham radio operators used a radio frequency messag- ing system called Winlink to transmit the counties’ requests for assistance to the state’s Office of Emergency Management. “Monday morning the governor came in and we were briefing and later on called amateur radio operators ‘angels’ because that was the only source of communication we had to the coast,” said Marshall McKillip, the Emergency Management Office’s communications officer.
Following the storm, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski funded improvements to the state’s amateur radio infrastructure with a $250,000 grant for Winlink systems in each of the state’s 36 county-level EOCs. “We bought the appropriate equipment and then organized the delivery, the set up, the training and everything with amateur radio resources,” McKillip said. “It was quite a task for the amateurs to take on, but they did a great job.”
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