[On the eve of hurricane season here in Dixie, the following are the timely observations of Daisy Crepeau, KT4KW, and Ray Crepeau, K1HG, who were deployed to Hancock County, Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina, and to Palm Beach County, Florida, in the wake of Hurricane Wilma last season. - Rick Palm, K1CE]

Training: No longer is the ham with an HT adequately able to respond. Nor is the ham with mobile equipment or even a radio equipped "jumpkit".  Amateur operators need to be adequately trained.  The ARRL ARECC courses should be required, period. FEMA training, consisting of courses ICS 700, 800, 100, and 200 also should be required. Hams need to understand and be able to operate under the Incident Command System (ICS) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS). Training to operate under extreme stress is needed.

We saw a new ham arrive who didn't understand that two-way radiocommunication required releasing the PTT button to hear the other party. This individual also needed a crash course in the phonetic alphabet. An extreme case perhaps, but such operators were liabilities, not assets. Proper training and credentialing would prevent this.

Credentialing: FEMA, most state Emergency Management departments, law enforcement agencies, and even the Red Cross do not recognize hams with a local badge. The ARRL supports the local EC as the point person for Amateur Radio emergency operations, but the reality is that most disasters are going to encompass more than the local area. ARESMAT [ARES Mutual Assistance agreements] is the right idea but few ECs have built the necessary relationships with others outside their locales.  

Resource Typing: We need a system of Amateur Radio "resource types" that FEMA (or anyone needing communications support) can request when needed. See the work of the World Radio Relay League and their idea of "Amateur Radio Communications Teams" (ARCT) <http://www.emcomm.org > and <http://www.wrrl.org >. FEMA is in the process of specifying "resources." We need to be in that system.

Deployment Tasking: Pre-departure briefings covering assignments, duties and responsibilities in the deployed area, and conditions there, should be plainly explained and understood.  When we went to Mississippi we were sent to the wrong place and spent half a dayfinding where we were to go.

Message Handling: Passing messages from point A to point B is the primary mission during emergency responses. Hams are the worst at relaying messages. Butchering of messages passed to the EOC or to action personnel occurred in Mississippi. So, message handling training is absolutely necessary: The radiogram format gets the job done.

Recognition: The Red Cross is mandated by the federal government to manage shelter care and mass feeding of disaster casualties. The ARRL has many MOUs with a number of different agencies both federal and private. But in the real world they don't mean a thing. The Red Cross prefers to use persons who have been through their training sequences. FEMA couldn't care less about hams in spite of an MOU. And the list goes on and on. The ARRL needs to become recognized as a"Non Government Organization" (NGO), which will be called upon. When it hits the fan, FEMA will call for Amateur Radio resources to establish communication links, and not commercial entities.

-- Ray Crepeau, K1HG, and Daisy Crepeau, KT4KW

Source: May 17, 2006 ARES E-Letter/ARRL.