Tonight’s training will recap the Great Shakeout exercise held in April.
At 6:00 p.m. on Thursday April 21, 2022, ARES members at the County EOC - acting on a simulated
earthquake event centered on the East Cache Valley Fault - initiated a city by city station roll call from
the north of the county to the south, followed by a request for check ins by any individual stations
participating.
KF7NWA, KG7EEZ and I responded to the Newton EOC after hearing the activation notification over
the repeater. Knowing the computer system was inoperable for data, and the more recent discovery
that the EOC radio had experienced memory failure, I brought my personal radio and a laptop to use
for the exercise.
After the initial roll call of city and individual stations, EOC to EOC voice communications moved to
the EOC intercom simplex frequency, while messages sent by Winlink were to be transmitted to the
County EOC Winlink address via internet, or with a radio connected to a computer over one of the
local gateway frequencies.
During a fire department training meeting in April, Newton firefighters discussed earthquake response
and identified the pioneer era rock houses in Newton as a specific earthquake hazard. Other areas of
concern were Newton Reservoir and some of the bridges in our response zone. Based on these hazards
messages for the exercise were prepared.
Operators at the Newton EOC transmitted one voice message to the county EOC, requesting road
closed signs rom the Cache County Road Department for a simulated bridge with possible damage.
Our Winlink message would be a damage assessment report related to the rock home special hazard
identified by the fire department members.
The change in scenery from home to the EOC caused a packet connection issue that I was not
expecting. We sent an initial Winlink message via telnet to make sure we had a response on record,
then we worked at it again until we were successful over a packet connection. Thanks to input from
KF7NWA the incorrect setting was managed.
Lessons learned from this exercise:
First, testing equipment and processes regularly are important to verify usability and to maintain
familiarity. While I’ve had consistent success transmitting Winlink messages over the local gateway
frequencies during the 1st Tuesday of each month ARES tests, that night at the EOC it took some
adjustments to make the connection.
Second, while we were prepared to use a different radio this time, knowing how to program our
equipment manually is important. If we had not known of the memory failure in the EOC radio we
would not have been able to complete even the voice element of the exercise without lengthy
reprogramming for repeater offsets and tone squelch for the many frequencies listed on the ICS 205.
Most importantly, we realized it would be better if the EOC had all the equipment necessary for voice
and data communication on site, instead of relying on equipment to be brought in at the time of
activation. Since the exercise in April we have received approval from the Town Council to purchase
new equipment and will work towards that goal in the coming months.
As a reference, the blog post for this training will contain a link to the Cache County Emergency
Communications plan and the frequency list.