Meetings/20180908
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Casey Dunn and Peggy Wargo (SSEO ) joined Jeneen Sommers at the La Honda Fire Department as part of the County Wide 'Yellow Command' exercise.
Jeneen walked us through how to open the fire station as an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and to set up in a corner of the common room set aside for radio communications.
General Points:
- bring your laptop, your hand held Ham HT/WalkieTalkie thing( as many as you can, for monitoring various chanels ) and headsets for your phone and your radio ( it gets super noisy in that room as the different teams start rolling in ) extra headsets are great, draft a person to be your logger.
- break out the donated single-band radio from the waterproof case under the reserved desk. Fire it up and start looking for radio traffic via CMD31 then the Sherrifs on CTL35 and finally the VTACs ( tactical channels, if you can hear them. )
- set up a CommNet, ask for check-ins by region/hamlet/township, log check-ins
- points out the donated old laptop - no one knows anything about it.
- set up the FEMA designated documents ( standard as from CERT TRAINING )
- she's going to cook up some blank FEMA Communications Plan documents with the common radio repeaters used coastside
- use white board to start a map of the incident
- Phone is to be answered. THERE IS A SCRIPT SOMEWHERE! JUST TAKE INFO! YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY RESPECT MAH NON-AUTHORTAH!!!
Ok the exercise.
It became clear that some of the OES repeater 'links' were not working, and as a result the people doing the exercise had to act as manual 'repeaters.' lThis means they were logging requests and forwarding them directly to those points requested.
In this case the La Honda EOC could not communicate with the County EOC ( CEOC ) in Half Moon Bay. Relay requests were made to South Skyline, (some dude named Brian), Portola Heights, ( Pat ) and Pescadero ( Ranger Bob ). At some point Cascio Ridge jumps in too, but I don't know who that is - can some one else fill us in?
From the relay points CTL93 and CTL95 were deemed too busy with traffic to break in.
The exercises script also called for testing 6 Meter communications. This is a longer range band licensed Hams can use. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-meter_band ) and is sometimes called 'The Magic Band.' The radios at the EOC don't operate at that band, but Brian at South Skyline was able to relay a request. Unfortunately it turned out that they could hear him pretty well but he couldn't hear them - the conclusion was that there was some kind of equipment problem.
Post Mortem.
Man things seemed messed up. OEC repeater links are down and no one knows why, the local officials had said "Oh this exercise isn't including amature services" and later " where are the Ham volunteers? " goofus. OES was s upposed to distribute exercise documents but failed to.
Fireman Ari dropped by, chatted with all of us and stated that this experince was good - it shows that this region is really on its own. He's confident we can all work through what we need and plow ahead, essentially keeping an eye out for some kind of benefit from the umbrella organizations but otherwise lifting ourselves by our bootstraps
exulted base of command The radio waterproof box
this desk folds up. The laptop on top is the operators. the laptop in the tray is 'always there.' There is a diplexer / splitter just above the operators right hand; that has both HF and VHF/UHF outlets. The radio on the table belongs to the operator.