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On 11/3/2014 5:25 PM, David Platt wrote:
[A bit late in chiming in here, but it took a while to locate the document I was hoping for.] And a big thank you for doing so. We had a vaguely similar incident here back in 2009, when some effectively-targeted vandalism knocked out almost all phone service in large parts of several counties in my area, during the wee hours of 4/9/2009. Land-line and cell calls were both affected, including almost all 9-1-1 service. It took most of the day to restore a substantial amount of the disrupted service. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/articl...ce-3245380.php Fortunately nobody died (as far as I know) as a result of being [not ] able to call 9-1-1 for medical or fire or police emergencies. It could easily have been otherwise. Ham-radio responders were activated by the city and county RACES organizations, to provide liason communication between public safety organizations and hospitals, and to serve as points of contact for the public in case of emergencies. It was a good experience in most regards for the hams. Fortunately, we didn't encounter any actual life-threatening incidents which required our services in the moment. So it took roughly 5 hours for the Amateurs to respond after the initial incident? And you got a total of 43 people. I asked our DEC whether he had any sort of post-incident report in his files, and he did... and has given me the OK to post it for anyone interested: http://www.radagast.org/~dplatt/hamr...tionReport.pdf An excellent report. In our county, we're signed up as California Disaster Service Workers... so, when formally activated, we become (in effect) unpaid employees of the activating government body (city or county), covered under Workman's Compensation for injuries, and protected by some limited liability coverage. These protections would *not* apply to us (or anyone else including random ham volunteers) who just "jump in" on our own initiative. Although I have to wonder if the people in charge are fully aware of their lack of liability in calling us. And if they would tend to ignore us in the effort of "playing it safe." -- Jeff-1.0 wa6fwi http://www.foxsmercantile.com |
#2
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In article ,
Foxs Mercantile wrote: In our county, we're signed up as California Disaster Service Workers... so, when formally activated, we become (in effect) unpaid employees of the activating government body (city or county), covered under Workman's Compensation for injuries, and protected by some limited liability coverage. These protections would *not* apply to us (or anyone else including random ham volunteers) who just "jump in" on our own initiative. Although I have to wonder if the people in charge are fully aware of their lack of liability in calling us. And if they would tend to ignore us in the effort of "playing it safe." I can't say for sure about how much the whole Government safety hierarchy knows about the situation... lots of people there, not many are all that familiar with amateur radio or with the Disaster Service Worker rules. What I can say is that the "contact people" we work with fairly directly (in my city and county) seem to be very well informed. In my city we have an excellent relationship between the ARES/RACES group, and the relevant city government department. The "sponsoring official" is the city's Emergency Manager. He's the one who has to sign an activation authorization (or formally delegate the right to do so in an emergency), and I know that he and our RACES Emergency Coordinator have had many discussions about the terms of activation, the DSW coverage, and so forth. He knows he's taking on liability whenever he signs an activation (even one for training purposes). One of the big reasons we have developed a formalized training program here, is that the city/county government people *are* aware that they're taking on some legal liability/responsibility for us when they activate us... and they need to be comfortable with the fact that they're doing so. They really don't want "loose cannons" on the roster... i.e. "volunteers" would would jump into a dangerous situation, get in over their head (well beyond their training) and cause further problems, or suffer an expensive injury (or injure someone else) for which the city or county would then be liable. That's one reason for the MAC (Mutual Aid Communicator) program we have. The city ECs will not release a ham for service outside his/her sponsoring city (in effect, transferring responsibility and liability to the county or to another city) unless the ham has been MAC-qualified, which requires taking several training courses and having a more senior MAC "evaluator" sign off on the ham's training and equipment. Ham responders who haven't gone through this formal certification program may be activated for in-city emergencies, but will be generally be "paired up" with a more senior operator. "Convergent volunteer" hams who just show up with a radio and try to jump in and help, with no training and no familiarity with local operating procedures... well, they'll probably be sent down to the city volunteer center with all the other spontaneous volunteers, and probably won't be activated as ham DSWs for anything other than closely-supervised operation "in the shack". It's taken years of work, but at this point, the emergency managers in a lot of the cities in our county do consider the RACES hams to be a valuable city resource, and don't want to have them all run off to another location. It took some discussion and negotiation to get them to agree that the RACES EC (who is typically not a city employee) could have permission to release one or two MACs for service elsewhere in an emergency, without a specific "OK, we don't need them here" goahead from the city Emergency Manager. One of the biggest perceived benefits we've been able to offer the cities, is the fact that we can mobilize a lot of "eyes and ears" very quickly, and get situation reports back to the EOC much faster than if the cities had to send out police and fire staff. In a real disaster (e.g. a M6+ earthquake) the paid public-safety staff is going to be 200% busy handling specific emergencies, and won't have time to gather overall situation information. We've demonstrated that we can get a boatload of "walking survey" and "windshield survey" information back to the EOC, by the time the Emergency Manager arrives... give the EM a sense for where the city's public safety and disaster control staff can be most effectively deployed... and then "activate" some of those hams to serve as communication liasons with public safety, Red Cross and other shelter locations, and so forth. Our county program information is at http://www.scc-ares-races.org/ |
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