Nothing amateur about it

Nothing amateur about it

"Nothing amateur about it
Rob Newell photo
DIALLED IN - Logan Hart in the North Shore Emergency Management Office communications room.
By JENNIFER MALONEY

Staff Reporter
Sep 29 2005

Within five minutes of receiving a bed-waking page January 19 at 4:30 a.m., 10 North Shore Emergency Management workers were on their amateur radios receiving assignments to help with the devastating landslide in North Vancouver.

Simultaneously, two retired emergency communication volunteers abandoned their warm sheets for the Seymour Fire Hall where they retrieved the communication's command post van, which would allow the elderly men to transmit and receive messages from the disaster zone.

'We knew there were a couple of things that were going to happen pretty quickly,' remembers Logan Hart, a volunteer for the North Shore Management Office, and a member of the North Shore Amateur Radio Club. 'First of all that's a tough area to get radio signals into. So not everyone's radio signals are going to work very well.'

Police and firefighters were able to get a signal at the site, but the North Shore Rescue Team's radios were cutting out. The amateur radio signal, however, was crystal clear.

'North Shore rescue ended up coming over onto the amateur radio system when they needed to reach somebody [at the Emergency Management Office],' Hart recalls. 'Their repeaters were just not in the right spot for that operation.'

On the North Shore, amateur radio is the Emergency Management Office's primary communication panel. When conventional systems are down, as they often are in disasters like Hurricane Katrina, rescue and relief workers turn to an international fraternity of hobbyist who are experts in what some view as a diminishing breed of technology.

"Where the amateur radio community really shines, is what we joke about is the 'MacGyver factor'," Hart says from the EMO communication office. "Got a piece of wire? Okay, I need about 60 feet and I'll make you an antenna and I'll talk to California from here in 10 minutes."

When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast earlier this month, toppling communication towers, virtually all major networks shut down. Towers that weren't destroyed from the 150 mile per hour winds were missing power grids and running on generators. The result was chaos.

Luckily, The Salvation Army, which has an emergency radio network made up of amateurs across the continent, was able to restore communication.

"They set up an interim radio station with very simple stuff at a reception centre for the refugees, for the Superdome, the Astrodome, and dealt with the Red Cross registration and inquiry people," Hart informs. "Someone looking for a family member that was evacuated, [is thinking] how do we connect with them? Literally thousands of these messages and inquiries [were sent out] and answered back."

Some of the messages were sent orally, while others were transmitted through text messaging, a technology that can actually take data off a battery-powered computer and transmit it through a hand radio. Text messaging, which is relatively new to amateur radio, was particularly useful in the registration of refugees across the Gulf Coast.

Although the Lower Mainland is not faced with the same issues Katrina presented to the Gulf Coast, where everything was unpowered, under water and flattened, disasters such as an earthquake or a major brush fire are concerns local emergency workers prepare for.

Turning to the window in the EMO communications office on East 14th Street, Hart points to Mt. Seymour.

"There are three very large transmission towers on Mt. Seymour," he says. "Over 150 commercial broadcasters of various types are on there. CBC is up there, BC Ambulance, some police and some fire. Would those sites be destroyed [in a brush fire]? Very good chance. It would take some time to rebuild that. In the meantime what do you do? What's the plan B?"

The EMO's amateur radio equipment allows operators to run three high frequency operations simultaneously. The office has access to approximately 80 volunteers from the North Shore Amateur Radio Club, but Hart estimates there are a couple hundred of people in the area who are educated in amateur radio and would likely come forward during an emergency.

Almost all amateur radio equipment is based on 12 volt power, which can be generated from a car battery.

In the event of disaster, priority is given to communications that locate evacuation¨
North Shore ham radio operators a vital link when disaster strikes.

73 fer nw,
Bob N5IET

(old calls KE5CTY - WB5ZQU - WY5L)
10X# 37210, FP#-1141, SMIRK#-5177
http://www.qsl.net/ke5cty/
Code may be taking a back seat for now,
but the pioneering spirit that put the code
there in the first place is out front of it all.