Announcements
Thursday, April 21, 2022 is this year's observance of the Great Utah Shakeout drill. Cache County ARES will conduct an exercise that evening beginning at 6:00 p.m. over 146.720 and simplex 147.520. I encourage you to listen to the exercise if you are able to do so.
The Northwest Cache Valley Net is now using a group email service. If you have not received or responded to an invitation to join the group, but would like to do so, please send a subscription email to the following address:
nwcvnet+subscribe@groups.io
After you send a message to the subscription email address, you will receive a confirmation request message from Groups.io. You must respond to that confirmation request to complete your subscription and join the group.
Training
In conjunction with the Shakeout drill this week, tonight’s training will center around my thoughts as a firefighter about what an emergency response would look like.
Fire and EMS personnel are the lead emergency responders in our small communities. Cache County is divided into response zones, served by volunteer fire and EMS departments staffed by citizens of the community, and in a few cases, career departments.
Realizing that most agencies are volunteer staffed and their members are employed elsewhere, available personnel may be limited, especially during the day. To combat short staffing, automatic agreements exist between the individual departments. This increases the likelihood there will be adequate numbers of personnel to manage the incident, once they arrive from the neighboring communities.
If the emergency becomes a countywide event, I believe this automatic aid will not come because the neighboring fire stations will have calls for service in their own response zone. It will be up to the fire and EMS responders in each community to do what they can until the time outside help is available. It's not possible for each community to maintain and staff enough fire engines and ambulances to cover the rapid increase of requests for assistance we would see in the event of a major earthquake, but we will do the best we can.
A little plug for personal preparedness here. If large parts of our valley are affected by an emergency, it's easy to see how important it will be for individuals and families to be as self-reliant as possible. I encourage everyone to set attainable preparedness goals and work towards those goals.
If we do have one of those emergencies where each city or town fire department must fend for itself, what can amateur radio operators in each community do to help?
Amateur Radio operators have been a communication resource in emergency situations ever since radio has existed. To the agencies they serve, amateurs are immediately available communication experts. Amateurs have the equipment, the skills, and access to the necessary frequencies, along with a diversified network of stations at homes, emergency operations centers, and served agencies to provide added communications capacity during times of emergency or disaster. They are licensed and preauthorized for national and international communication.
If the public safety agencies responsible for your community do not have a relationship with amateur radio operators, I would bet it’s because those agencies do not understand how amateur radio could expand their capabilities during an emergency. Even though I’ve had an amateur ticket for most of the time I’ve served as a firefighter, any coordination with the amateur radio operators in my town has been through ARES, not directly at the town level.
After a short time as an ARES member, as well as coordinating this net, I better understand how our communities would benefit if their communication plans included amateur radio operators. For example, 15 fire departments handling life safety traffic as well as other important, but less critical information - such as damage assessment reports - over the public safety radio system would create a huge backlog, but amateur operators in each EOC with winlink compatible radios would certainly ease the load. At our last fire department training meeting we discussed this very thing and I’m excited to start that coordination process here in Newton.
If you have a desire to be involved at the community level, consider joining Cache County ARES. ARES members will coordinate directly with the County EOC during an emergency and gaining experience in that program is a great way to prepare for a discussion with your elected officials and the public safety agency responsible for your area. Visit barconline.org/ares for more information.
Another avenue is to become involved with the Bishop Storehouse net. Even if you have not been called to serve as a communications specialist for this faith based organization, they welcome visitors to their twice monthly radio nets. The schedule for Cache County ARES and the Storehouse nets are posted on our blog the first day of each month.
Additionally, if a large-scale emergency response does occur in one or more of the communities
represented by this net, as soon as possible I or another operator will be available on our primary net frequency 146.550 to help coordinate communication between the County EOC and the Bishop's
Storehouse.