6. Feb-Nov 2003

During the September organizational meeting, there were concerns expressed about the time commitment an individual would have toward ARES.

It was mutually agreed upon at that time, if additional monthly training, public service events, or activations occurred during the month, that the regularly scheduled drill would be cancelled.

Actual events provide more "real time-live" training than any scenario we could come up with, and limits the amount of time volunteer operators devote to Emergency Communications.

As you can see from of "history" page, from February to present day has been busy.

We are, however, planning the "super catastrophy" for later on this year-as soon as some of the public service event involvement slows down.

Feel free to download and print out our past scenario's. Learn from our mistakes, and the things that worked for us.

In Emergency Communications, no one can afford to take criticism personally-everyone can learn from everyone else's mistakes. Get the bugs ironed out as much as possible BEFORE an actual event occurs-that's when it is too late to find out something does not work.

During the summer months of 2003 our schedule did not allow for drills, as it did in our first year of re-organization.

Public service events such as parades, fairs, bicycle events, marathons etc. kept us pretty busy.

We also became involved in providing instruction with the ARECC Level I & II classes.

Our local VE teams then scheduled test sessions for each of the 4 classes held this year.

We also had several agency activations during 2003, one that lasted 4 days during the heavy flooding in the county, a 2 day event, and 3 single day activations.

This combined with monthly meetings and training kept our membership active for the 2003 year.