Fwd: ARES Section Report - September, 2011

[mbbelling]

Jackson County ARES members:

The Section Emergency Coordinator asks that the following report be shared with you.

--

Mike Bellinger

ARES® Emergency Coordinator

for Jackson County, MO

Home Phone: 816-363-1118   

SMS Cell Phone: 816-719-0211  

Email Address: MBBe...@aol.com  

Home Street Address: 224 East 74th Street  

Kansas City, MO  64114-1420  

Begin forwarded message:

From:	"Ken Baremore" <w0...@yahoo.com>
Subject:	ARES Section Report - September, 2011
Date:	October 10, 2011 5:28:59 PM CDT

 Greetings to all.

Please pass this along to the EC's in your district and I ask that they in turn pass it along to the rest of the ARES membership.

 

September has come and gone and it seemed to be a good month for most of the Districts.

 

District D & F had members out providing comms for the MS Bike Rides, as well as other Bike Rides for Diabetes, etc.  To my way of thinking -- Providing communications for PS Events (Such as the MS Bike Rides) are great practice runs for emergency operations.  In our area the instructions to the operators that will be working at a rest stop go something like this:

Go to this location --A house, or parking lor or ?  The ARES members have to figure out where it is and how to get there.

Set up your station,  make sure that you have the necessary power (portable power as commercial power is not available, the right antenna & mast as needed, radio & headphones or whatever, etc. to run for the day,  Bring along everything you may need - including food & drink, shelter,  and failure is not an option. 

 

Does that sound to you like the directions for a quick response to an emergency operation ?

 

District A had a real emergency operation when a backhoe took out the 911 phone system.  Great response from the group and hopefully most of you saw the write-up in the Division newsletter.

 

Ham radio also got a nice write up about helping the boy scouts learn about Ham radio.

 

The annual ARRL SET is scheduled for October or sometime in the fall of the year.   I am not aware of any "Total" District involvement, must less, have I been able to set up something for our entire Section -- But, District A did get involved and the report for that is shown below.  Hopefully reading it may give us all ideas of things we can get involved in.

 

The message below refers to a regional SET we had here Saturday. Northland and Jackson County ARES and Independence ECS participated on the Missouri side. Leavenworth County ARES, Wyandotte County RACES and Johnson County ARES and ECS participated on the Kansas side.

Subject: [MECC_KC] 2011 SET Thank you
Well, Another successful Simulated Emergency Test is in the books.Here's a few numbers: we had 7 jurisdictions / agencies play with over 150 radio operators participating during the 6 hour exercise. In addition many more operators outside the metro area share information and demonstrated the ability to pass traffic including the SW Kansas Hospital Group and the Citizen's Hospital in Colby Kansas even provided the same blood unit count the folks at the Community Blood Bank were looking for. In fact they tallied over 1500 units of "O" type blood available which sounds very reassuring until the region has a mass casualty event, then it will only seem like a good start. There was a wide variety of exercise activity from several jurisdictions supporting Public Health operations to the Independence operation demonstrating that amateur radio could be used to substitute for their public safety radio system to dispatch fire response from live calls. KCMO was able to inspect 10 community centers confirming weather radio operation and to provide their served public with personal preparedness information. Great work by great people.As with all exercises strengths and improvements were identified and will be captured for the After Action Report and Improvement Plan. Many jurisdictions performed actions they had never done before and with great success. The overarching elements such as the simplex check allowed stations to have a feel for their ability to communicate without any additional infrastructure. Many stations were able to send digital traffic as well, completing another of the regional elements. Some facilities had real world challenges such as the KCVA hospital, working from the radio position in the KCVA's police dispatch area for the first time, did so without main AC power. As one could imagine this caused a great deal of activity plus the challenge of operating by flashlight, but they hung on and completed the exercise. Great Work guys! Likewise the Johnson County EOC cycled onto generator power in the middle of the exercise and lost power on one computer. Another improvement duly noted and will be resolved on Monday.Most important is to acknowledge the hard work and impressive performance of all involved. I think we have successfully demonstrated that we can provide a significant resource to the emergency response operations throughout the region and I wouldn't hesitate for a second to take any of this group on the road to support a need elsewhere just like we did in Joplin this year. We did hold a short Hotwash after the exercise to allow for a sharing of the initial evaluation results from the Controller / Evaluators which was educational.

 

 

We had 8 of our 9 Districts reporting this month. I  hope we will be back to 9 of 9 next month.  The section report is as follows:

 

MISSOURI ARES SECTION REPORT FOR							SEP	2011		SEC
DISTRICT	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	TOTAL
# Counties	13	16	12	18	13	13	9	15	6	115
# Reporting	5	6	6	12	0	4	2	3	3	41
# Members	219	180	253	180	N	66	21	31	115	1065
Plus / Minus	-5	2	3	9	O	2	7	1	0	19
# Training Drills	25	18	35	51		12	8	5	11	165
Hours	441	45	253	353.5	R	11.5	28	22	36	1190
# Public Svc	5	0	1	6	E	3	0	0	0	15
Hours	45	0	65	689.5	P	2486	0	0	0	3285.5
# Emer Ops	1	0	0	5	O	0	0	0	0	6
Hours	48	0	0	108	R	0	0	0	0	156
# Total Ops	31	18	36	62	T	15	8	5	11	186
Total Hours	534	45	318	1151		2497.5	28	22	36	4631.5

 

Thanks to all of you for your continued work to make ARES - Missouri Section a great organization.

73,

Ken

Kenneth Baremore  WØKRB

Section Emergency Coordinator

ARES®  Missouri Section

Amateur Radio Emergency Service®

Home:  417-886-7137

Mobile: 417-827-3392

www.ares-mo.org