The Week of 5/14/07

Wednesday May 16th started out as a wet and dreary day. At 10:00 am it started going down from there. The Fire Pager went off announcing that emergency Coordination for Genesee County Fire Departments had been activated for an airplane incident at Bishop International Airport. Two aircraft had been reported to have crashed into one another and there were many dead and injured. Thus began the annual Genesee County Michigan Disaster Drill with ARES operator right in the middle of it.

The Scenario starts with the planes crashing into each other at the end of the southern runway. At that report the Fire Coordination teams of Genesee County are toned out and Genesee County Amateur Radio Emergency Service, Inc. is a major part of that team. This group of ARES Volunteers provides additional communication to all Genesee County Fire Department as well as the Office of Emergency Management/ Department of Homeland Security. Their function at this drill was to do just that. Team members were assigned to the Incident Commander, The Operations Officer, Medical, Genesee County 911 Dispatch, Flint City Dispatch all three Hospitals in the area as well as transportation services, public information officer, staging and more. The newest position to be filled was the Amateur Radio Operator for the new Genesee County Mobile Command Unit which house command communications for all Emergency responders as well as the Office of Emergency management.

During the drill local school students played the roll of dead and injured plane passengers that had to be treated, decontaminated and transported by Bus and or ambulance to the three local Hospitals. All Fire departments from Genesee County participated in the drill which included and actual burning aircraft which had to be extinguished.

Public safety communication in Genesee County is a mix of VHF for the City of Flint and 800MHz for the out county areas. Thus the 30 Amateur radio operators from Genesee, Oakland and Livingston County played a major roll in get information to and from the various contact points.

ATV Amateur Radio Television played an even larger roll then expected. Have set up three camera positions they were able to feed video to the Emergency Operations Center in the basement of the Genesee County Administration building as well as the Mobile Command Unit with Broadcast Quality Video. One of the operators even set up a wireless link from his camera back to his van where he did a DVD recording of the entire scene while transmitting to the ATV repeater on top of McLaren Regional Hospital which retransmitted to the EOC and the MCU.

Another aspect of the drill this year was that Civil Air Patrol had planned to over fly the site and take photos which would be transmitted by Slow Scan Television to a local Amateur Radio Station who would in turn email them to the Emergency Operations Center. However due to the inclement weather CAP was not able to fly. However that did not stop the Hams. The Operator of the SSTV station found some photos from a couple years ago and sent them to the EOC just like they had got them from the Civil Air Patrol.

In the middle of the drill we even had a couple of actual incidents regarding the Students that were being transferred to the Hospital’s. And to Coin a phrase “Amateur Radio was there!” It turned out that because there were ARES Operators on the busses where the unplanned minor injuries occurred. Hams reported the injuries and maintained updates without ever going through the Public Service Radio system.

Following the Drill at the debriefing both Greg Ybarra N8HXQ the EC for Genesee County and Grace Ranger KC8BOE, Director of Emergency Management and Homeland Security for Genesee County were very pleased with the way things went and how the little problems were handled.

Sadly just a few days on Friday May 18th the Fire Coordinators and ARES were once again activated. This time it was not a drill; the Historic City of Linden Michigan was on fire. The “Union Block” which was built more than 100 years ago was on fire. 25 Fire departments from all over Genesee County and from Northern Oakland County fought the blaze for over 9 hours.
Many of the ARES members had gone south to the Dayton Hamvention the day before so operators were thin but available. As in any major incident Ham Operators pulled together. The Genesee Co. EC Greg Ybarra N8HXQ staffed the fire scene with the operators that he had on hand. After 8 hours the call went out to the neighboring counties for assistance through the District 3 EC Greg Allinger. As relief operators were being set up the Fire Coordinators declared the fire under control and start releasing Fire Stations. Shortly after that ARES operators were released to go home in the earlier hours of Saturday May 19th.

Again Amateur Radio operators provided a vital service of communications to the Emergency Service Personnel of Genesee County. The Fire Chief and citizens of the City of Linden have expressed their gratitude to the County Fire Coordination Teams for their quick response and ability to control the fire to only one of the many historic building of Down Town Linden.