CERTs prepare for 6th citywide radio exercise Oct 17

John Q: This Saturday morning, local volunteers will practice responding to a simulated disaster. Neighborhood volunteers, including some with extra training as Community Emergency Response Teams (known as CERTs) and as ham radio operators will conduct a citywide exercise. We spoke with Andy Davis from the Eugene Springfield CERTs.

John Q: Good luck this weekend. What time are you getting started?

Andy Davis: Used to be, years past, it was at 10 a.m. to noon, and then we had a 1 p.m. Zoom debrief, to go over.

But this year and last year we changed it to have, we felt it was very important, that we make sure that everybody’s radios are working properly and that everybody can communicate, going down the link and up the link. So we start at 9:30 with radio checks.

In the past when we started at 10 a.m., some districts and neighborhoods didn’t pass their first traffic until like, quarter to 11, because it took them that long to figure out why the radios were not working. So we want to try to get that out of the way, make sure we’ve got good comms.

And then, 10 a.m, the EOC (Emergency Operations Center) will come on the air and announce who they are and start doing the radio check themselves with the each of the districts, and then inform the districts to notify their neighborhood hams that they notify their counterparts, the neighborhood damage assessment teams, radio team leaders and so forth, to go ahead and start assessing the neighborhood for damage, and report what they see and start generating messages to go back up.

John Q: So if we have some newcomers, it’s a little late to participate in this year’s exercise. But any folks with a radio might be able to tune in. How would they listen in?

Andy Davis: Well, I would recommend going to the EugeneEmComm.org website, and find the Neighborhood Radio Communication Response Guide and find in the back there, there are maps. And the map breaks down the FRS channels for each of the neighborhoods, wherever they may be.

So if they have an FRS radio, and they can find out on that map where they live, they can tune their radio to that channel, listen.

If they are a ham radio operator and they want to listen to the chatter, also in that resource guide has a frequency for each of the districts, that the districts speak to their neighborhood hams.

These frequencies in each of the district are different, and they are the upper UHF frequencies. The frequency that we go to the EOC, we use the emergency communication frequency of 146.880 with the 100 Hz tone. And we use that until that repeater is no longer functional in the—if something really happens, then we have to resort to a simplex.

We always want to have more neighborhoods to develop and stand up damage assessment teams. And so we’re looking for more volunteers to cover the city.

And of course when you have more damage assessment teams, you need to have more neighborhood hams that can send their traffic to. So, we need more volunteers in that area as well.

If an individual really would like to be a part or stand up a damage assessment team or try to form one within their neighborhood, I think what I would do is I would kind of steer them to our website.

Just say, ‘I’m so and so. I live here,’ you know, so we know where you’re at and ‘I would like to be a part of a damage assessment team,’ or ‘form up a team where I have a couple neighbors who would like to do that. What, how do we have started?’

Then we can get back to you, get back to them, and kind of start working with them and give them some training and preferably try to find a CERT that is near them that could be their radio team leader.

If not, we will train them to be a radio team leader to pass their information. The radio team leader is important. Because we have to train them on how to use the ICS forms, which we use to pass traffic and things.

John Q: And those are just the standard forms that all the emergency responders use? Yes. So by putting into that format, that’s something they’re familiar with , they can take that and act instantly.

Andy Davis: Right. The CERT personnel, they’ve already gone through the forms, and we try to train, regularly throughout the year, on working with these forms because not only as a radio team leader or neighborhood ham or someone else working in MCOM using the two major forms that we use, which is the ICS two 13 and the radio log.

But you could also support other agencies, FEMA or somebody else that is in the ICS system and you could support them as well by working with these forms.

John Q: Yeah, and there’s free training usually (Yes) for all of this on the FEMA website.

Andy Davis: Yes, there is.  And we on the EugeneEmComm.org page website, we have many training videos on the same subject that can be viewed and followed.

John Q: You had a September exercise to shake the rust off, and now you’re getting ready for this Saturday, the 17th.

Andy Davis: We like doing that. We call it the ‘dry run’ in September. And it seems like everyone else likes to do that and it is a good practice to go through, just to make sure.

Ssometimes we hit some problems, especially with FRS radios. Sometimes inadvertently a privacy line code, PL code will be put on the channel for their FRS channel that they use. And then it doesn’t work well.

We stress that we have a PL code of zero. That way everybody can talk to one another. But some of these radios that we have—mine included—you turn ’em off and turn them on, inadvertently, they’ll put a code on, so you have to check and make sure that you don’t have an inadvertent PL code down to the right of your channel number.

But that’s good. That’s what we do. We find out those things.

So each year we’ve tried to do something different. Last year we did kind of play a little bit with Winlink going to Lane County. We did have other folks out in Lane, we had Creswell participate. We had Blue River last year to participate.

We also set up another city to be the recipient of all the messages, which was Springfield, over there. So that was last year.

This year we brought in the city of Eugene Call Center, the 911 Call Center.

What we’re going to do this year is we’re sending our traffic to the EOC (Emergency Operations CentER) and then the EOC is going to send a couple of messages to the Call Center, along with the picture. So we’re doing a picture that will go with the 213 message to the Call Center. So we want to see how that goes.

That may be something that we may work towards more within the future. We may have a district send their messages via Winlink to the EOC. We’re not certain on that yet, but we’ll see.

It’s very, very fast. It’s faster than a voice, which is understandable, because it’s all 1s and 0s going over electronically. So it’s very fast. And also a number of years ago when they had the hurricane went through the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, all the first responders there that would support ham radio operators, they were all using Winlink.

And FEMA was out actually, looking for more ham radio operators that had, experience using Winlink, ’cause that’s what they were using back then. So, it’s a very good resource, good tool to have. And so we’re just hoping that it will be viewed as a very good tool, worth spending money on.

We don’t want to move away from voice because voice is always there when everything else fails. If you have a radio voice is there, Winlink is fine. But it can be a little spendy and we do not expect our neighborhood teams to have to go that route of funding things that way.

A lot of people already have FRS radios because of hunting, fishing, and camping and hiking, so that expense is there, and so they can utilize what they’ve already have, so we don’t want to put a burden on that.

For next year we’re trying to some high-visibility vest with those damage assessment teams, so people will see them. ‘Cause mostly those damage assessment teams, they’re not a CERT person, they’re just a concerned citizen that wants to help their neighbors. I think it’d be important that they have a high-vis vest.

So we’re thinking about maybe we could get some, a number of vests and maybe on the back say ‘Eugene Damage Assessment Team’ or something like that.

We want to make sure that people stay safe. And then also other neighbors won’t be alarmed if they see a couple people walk around the street trying to figure out, ‘Well, what’s going on here?’

We are trying to progress forward. So we have some ideas for next year that could involve something like a mass casualty in the neighborhoods. We’re brainstorming, thinking out the box, so to speak.

John Q: If you’re in Eugene, you’re a member of your neighborhood. And many neighborhoods have their own preparedness committees. You can find contact information for your neighborhood on the city website.

You can also go directly to the CERT and EmComm websites. EugeneEmComm.org is for radio volunteers in
support of community safety. EugeneEMCOMM.org.

The Eugene Springfield Community Emergency Response Team website is at eugene-cert.com.