County Wide Disaster Drill
July 15, 2002 -- The Emergency Communications team, now BCAREC, of the Butler County VHF Association (BCVHFA) W8CCI Radio Club participated in the Butler County Disaster Exercise. They requested the usual coverage of operators on the sites to report what was going on, keeping track of victims, where victims were being transported to, and to supplement the county fire & Emergency Management System (EMS) radio system during an emergency.
At the final planning session just a few days before the event, the hospital ER doctors wanted amateur operators to "shadow" them in and around the Emergency Room (ER) so they could have a "heads up" on what was coming their way from the sites.
The concern was using 5 watt portables around sensitive hospital monitoring equipment. Lower power would minimize the concern, but getting a readable signal into the repeater was another problem. With out a lot of time to "problem solve" we decided to utilize some of the member owned mobile equipment to CROSSBAND REPEAT to a vehicle parked outside the ER. It worked very well !
However, we forgot the need for the repeater carrier to drop before the portables could transmit. We made modifications to the repeater controller for ZERO HANG TIME and adjusted a few of the crossband radios to do a simplex to simplex cross band/locked band mode. The problem was solved and became part of our operating toolset for future events.
Communications between the Emergency Management Emergency Operations Center (EOC), Red Cross - Middletown, Red Cross - Hamilton, and the W8CCI Net Control Station were nearly flawless.
In debriefing the event, the thing that we were lacking was QUANTITY OF OPERATORS.
This was a drill and we had almost a month to get ready for it, however, we didn't have enough operators to fill all the locations that needed to be filled with operators.
If you have a desire to help out during a disaster as an Emergency Communicator, WE NEED YOU!
Come Join Us NOW!
This drill was written for the Butler County EMA, Fire, Rescue, and other agencies involved in the countywide drill.