Evacuations

[John Steup]

I have heard a lot about shelter in place scenarios, but not much about what to do to help with large evacuations. I'd love to see what people know about the topic and how NETs in particular would be most useful in a scenario where a lot of people need to leave and area rapidly (tsunami, spills, gas leaks, tanker fires, etc.) 

[Katy Wolf]

I'm also interested in this topic. When I read the Vice series (http://motherboard.vice.com/after-the-big-one) it described a scenario where St. Johns would be on fire from the tank farm fire spreading across the river, and people would be told to evacuate by walking east. I'm not too sure how that would happen, logistically. I've heard from the Red Cross outreach person, Tristen (forget her last name) that people would be told where shelters were and how to get there, but they couldn't tell us in advance where the shelters might be set up, or how they would notify people. Word of mouth wouldn't be fast enough, and helicopters with speakers might work (?), but I think the best way would be radios. The ECC would tell the BEECNs, who would then transmit on GRMS to the FRS/GRMS radios that NETs have. I think that's the point of having NETs use channels that can receive GRMS frequencies (channels 1-8).

[John Steup]

Thank for replying Katy!

I like the idea of BEECN sites in general, but those may not be in operation until 24-48 hours after a major event, so initial communications are pretty much going to be at street level. I agree that word of mouth would be slow (and subject to degrading the farther from the source it gets, like a game of "telephone") and it would be great if helicopters might be available, but there will be some serious prioritization going on, so we need to plan around that. One thing I know if that there will be ham radio operators (me included) throughout the city who will be checking into an central emergency net as soon as an event occurs, who will be able to send and receive information to the ECC and if we have enough of a radio network activated, those FRS/GMRS radio will come in very handy to pass information through NET team frequencies. Of course, the more Hams we have trained up, the better we will be able to spread the word over larger areas. 

To anyone else on this thread: Do you know of training programs available in PDX that deal with logistics, structure, sheltering and communications relating to evacuations? It's an area that I see a lot of value in and I would like to find ways to integrate that into the NET structure. 

Thanks!

John 

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