Meetings/20181020

As part of California's emergency preparedness efforts there have been 10 years of the Great California Shakeout - an earthquake drill conducted around the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

Our CEC set 10/20 as the date for this years event

Simulated Emergency Test (SET) for Branch 3 and Branch 4- October 20, 2018, 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.:

• Each year in October, the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) encourages all Amateur Radio Emergency Services (ARES) organization across the country to conduct an exercise that will test their ability to activate and respond with emergency communications. This year, the SC4ARES and South Skyline ARES organizations will be conducting a training exercise on October 20., 2018. The exercise will consist of a mass casualty event, with activations of ARES, Southcoast CERT, South Skyline CERT and SMC Large Animal Evacuation. A Lifeflight helicopter will be participating from a new Landing Zone in Castanea Ridge.

( Branch 1 & 2 had to postpone due to internal difficulties )

It may of been hard to tell what was going on due to the overlap of people and organizations ( CERT, SC4ARES, SMC Large Animal Evac etc ) but we were called out to participate! Casey attended and here are his notes.

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SET

The Skyline SET involved CEC groups 3 and 4 in a field reconnanance exerise supported by SC4ARC Amature Radio club. Additionally the Large Animal Rescue group exercised a gruop drill involving four or five animal trailers and large trucks.

After an interesting demonstration of Stanford's Helicopter Ambulance team we gathered at the Equestrian Parking area of Long Ridge OSP.

Notes from Helicopter Ambulance (Stanford Life Flight ) .

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• EC145 copter, full IFR instrumentation.
• wide range - Santa Barbra to the norther boarder, far east as REno
• some % of mercy lifts to transfer patients
• only non profit in area
• called out by incident commander
• carries 2 nurses and a pilot/copilot.
• carries 2 patients
• only helicopter in Ca carrying blood products
• advanced procedrues: intra-aortic balloon pumps, ECMO, intubation, arterial line work
• pretty good sized vehicle.
• max 5 trips a day due to refresh cycle. 2 mechanics
• scene requirements: https://stanfordhealthcare.org/health-care-professionals/lifeflight/scene-calls.html
• Radio: CALCORD is the frequency of choice for most EMS helicopters: 156.075 no PL.
  • NOTE: this is an Amateur Radio frequency. It's OK to listen in at all times. Don't interrupt!

Drill

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We were partitioned into ? 4 groups and sent to various neighborhoods along skyline. some of the households in these areas had granted permission for tromping along their properties. the exercise was to examine the property, assess damage both personal and property, and report back. Each group leader had a scenario packet which we opened when we arrived at the properties.

AFAIK this was the first exercise of this sort in this area.

I was teamed up with Bob Minton ( sp ) from Cloverdale. We were the 2 amateur radio operators in our 2 car group.

our missions

1. Openspace Housing off Sunny Jim Trail - we circled the building, assessing what type of damage might of been incurred to this structure in the scenarios earthquke. at this time we also tried to figure out what we were supposed to be doing - calling back observations immediately or just collecting.
2. some homes down in Crazy Peet's - the network of homes and rancheros down in this area was surprising to me. We had more confusion and useful discussion about our alacrity and dispatch, and musing about how were were to proceed with our observations. We suspected a number of places down in here would have major structural damage ( if they don't have that now ) and that looking for injured people would take a very long time. We also found poor radio coverage. ( attached estimate coverage)
3. and I think? Cloud's Rest. This one I believe was a beautiful older place way way down the hill. many small outbuildings. we had a number of scenario based reservations -
   1. way the hell down in here, no comms
   2. how would we know if there was a fire behind us?
   3. where are we anyway - what is our exit route
   4. who knows where we are?

and a couple real-world reservations - the power to this beautiful place was alarmingly directly draped across the limbs of some giant old oaks.

in all

• confusion about specifics of our drill. this was in part due to the long delay for the chopper and everyone wobbling back and forth across the OSP area to re-coordinate.
  • survey? Triage? evacuation? I guess these questions are the goals involved
• none of us had stand-alone maps ( even OSM maps would be good - the base maps Ari ( et al ) are using. These just use your phone's GPS capabilities, no data needed. like your old GPS unit for hiking. )
• we probably would of been toast with our actual kits if we had had any medical problems!
• we really didn't have enough water / supplies.
• there wasn't an assigned note-taker; after a house or two we focused more on assessing possible scenarios / specifics for each house ( which is great, builds eye skills and allows the team to recognize different individual strengths'n'offerings ) in a group dialog.

We hiked around in the heat for about 3 hours, examining a handfull of homes.

After one of these CERT operations there is a meeting to touch base while things are still in the forefront of people's minds. This meeting is commonly called a Hot Wash.

In our hot wash the above were probably mentioned. Given that the population of the CERT crew was pretty well overlapped with amateur radio operators much of the discussion in the hot wash focused on the communications aspect. As this is also an ARRL event all is good.

• go over exercise radio protocols first. Even experienced operators didn't know what to do.
• check that people know their teams channels. The cross-talk between 'regular folks' and licensed amateur operators caused a lot of detail to be missed. This is because the licensed operators have been trained in some ( simple ) conventions, whereas 'regular folks' just sort of think it's magic or something ;) that they are on a phone.
• catalog team capabilities - GMRS, ham, vehicles with cross band repeaters, where which repeaters may work

these also came up at the following SC4ARC monthly. Trucks / AWD. bikes? Slim-Jims? etc. Batteries? Generators? time to charge radios?

In the hot wash I felt there was a consensus that these should be done as much as quarterly, so we can be sure that at least we can communicate back up and down the hill. At the SC4ARC meeting it became clear that we would robably loose the repeaters even before we were out there searching all these nooks and crannies, and so we should get practice in simplex human-relay operations.

other notes

• I liked the 'scenario packets' our leader (Tom?) had. They had photos of each structure I think? And perhaps an exercise situation for each spot? My memory is a bit fuzzy on that, but I remember moments of guided dialog during assessment.
  • I suggest expanding on this, with 'surprise' cards thrown in. Or cards that the property owners could leave out such as "This house is on fire" etc. "5 people, all ok" "Abandoned" etc.
  • this allows the design of an assessment loop - where the IC can double check the accuracy of the CERT squad response based on either real-time radio call backs and later paper reports at the control site.
• it became clear that covering that area would take hours and hours / days
  • keeping track of time involved would be great - if we know we can search the homes on Crazy Peets in 3 hours, for example, ...
• I became a bit worried that in a real bad situation some of what I call 'freemericans' out there would shoot first if they saw a group of 4 or 6 people showing up. we have to have some kind of distant signal that we're trying to be good guys. I know the C part of CERT is supposed to forstall this... but.
• any chance of inter-area co-operation in Comms going down the east side? woodside or portola valley groups? at least for ad-hoc cross band repeater support during Search exercises such as this.
• I didn't have any coherent sense of what transpired within the Comms wagon, other than the hot wash chatter

I found this whole experience interesting and very sobering.

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this image shows estimated best-case 'walkie talkie' coverage for amateur radio operations in the SET region Casey was assigned to. the two colors are 2 different repeaters. This is not the range of the frequencies B0-B4 on our BCERT radios. BU UP is the yellow, in the back. this view is looking west from the Bay