NC Winter Weather "Exercise" - Review [nc-arrl]
December 11, 2000

NC Winter Weather "Exercise" - Review Meeting at NCEM As you know, the statewide "Winter Weather" drill scheduled for Dec. 7 was superceded by real winter weather the previous weekend. Emergency Management cancelled the drill because most of their objectives were met, even though the weather itself did not develop into the predicted storm. A few counties in eastern NC did get some serious snow. 

NCEM held a review meeting in Raleigh on the original drill date, Thursday, December 7th. The big EOC situation room was filled with people from all the departments involved in emergency activity. A representative of each reviewed the results of their activation. I attended the meeting, and took some notes. Here are the areas hams might be interested in: 

The Branch Offices were activated as Area Command centers, and as Incident Command centers. A National Guard colonel and a state Fire Marshall worked with the Branch Managers. This decentralized authority structure worked well. 

The state has a computerized messaging and database system for emergency communications called EM-2000. This is on a high-speed network in Raleigh, but outside the capital, access is by dial-up telephone. If the phones are out, so is EM-2000 for branch offices. The state's satellite phone system is not fast enough to carry significant data, so it won't work with EM-2000. That leaves voice communications only via the satellite phone and their other channels. (I hear the gears beginning to crank in some data-oriented ham's brains). The folks who use dial-up asked everyone not to put large graphics files in their messages. 

The Amateur Radio station at the State EOC does not yet have a link to EM-2000, but we should get one soon. That will allow the hams on duty to send and receive e-mail where internet systems are working, and forward traffic directly into the state's messaging system. We will NOT have an external EM-2000 link from our home stations, but we will have the ability to have e-mail to the State EOC Amateur Radio station forwarded to some key Wake County ARES members. Until the station is set for mail, we are not promoting this operation.

NCEM has written a new emergency operations plan, incorporating winter, hurricane and all-hazard situations into a single plan. You can download it in Adobe Acrobat PDF format from NCEM's web site: www.ncem.org. Look on the bottom of the page for the big red" North Carolina Emergency Operations Plan". It's a little over 2 MB, so if you're on dial-up, it'll take a while. It's also almost 500 pages, so it'll take a while to absorb once you have it. There'll be a quiz on Friday. 

Clay Benton, NCEM Chief of Communications (and our boss at State EOC) had some nice things to say about Amateur Radio. He reminded everyone that we have hams all across the state, acting as backup communications. He also said we provided NCEM with snowfall totals for the counties that did get hit with the storm. And he noted that the Wake County hams have been working hard to rebuild the State EOC station and train new operators. 

Beyond Amateur Radio, he noted problems the communications officers have at the beginning of an activation. The State EOC is staffed 24/7, but usually there are only one or two communications officers on duty. They get very busy when an activation begins, and just as they're trying to coordinate the activation, everyone needs to call them to get phone and pager numbers to activate staff, and everyone has EM-2000 problems. The managers were encouraged to keep that information handy so they didn't have to call and ask for it during an activation. 

This activation produced only three actual missions coordinated by NCEM. One Search and Rescue operation was mounted to find a hunter who was lost in the woods overnight (he was found by a helicopter), and two areas requested 4x4 transportation to bring medical personnel to hospitals. 

My final impression - there are a lot of people involved in handling emergencies in our state. Our role as Amateur Radio operators can make everyone else's job easier... or just possible... when other communications channels fail. Those other channels are pretty dependable, though, and all those other people won't be thinking of us much. Until they need us. Then, it will be up to us to quickly, dependable and professionally get their information passed through our hands.

73,

Gary KN4AQ