Some post-event discussions have taken place in person and during the weekly ARES/RACES Wednesday night training net and the following items have been identified.
The Wednesday night through Friday night before the drill were the Rosh Hashanah holiday. Two key members of group A as well as a number of other members of the ARES/RACES group were not available until Friday evening. With many schools closed Thursday and Friday, undoubtedly a significant percentage of the group were out of town for a four-day weekend.
We did not cause sufficient traffic to be generated during the local drill or on the SET nets. One of the goals of the SET drill is to stress the system by overloading it. This level of traffic was not reached. This is a common problem during SET drills which are driven by the Amateur Radio group rather than by served agencies as in other drills we participate in (such as Indian Point).
As the drill was not driven by the City of Rye and had no participation from Rye officials, it was not an exercise of the plan. An example of this problem is that the United Hospital Director of Security indicated that the Hospital had never been notified that a simulated EOC activation had taken place.
The communications van was brought to the drill to provide a simulated evacuation site command post. It was intended to be used to route traffic back to United hospital from the incident scene transport officer. However, due to lack of availability of a volunteer ambulance corps for transport, the patients actually gathered in a conference room at the hospital.
While the plan had been to have the patients come over to the van (which was parked in the hospital parking lot), send some traffic to the ER, and then simulate transporting the patients to the ER, this did not happen. Again, we see that without an adequate number of players, the communicators are at a loss for something to communicate.
Hindsight being 20-20, we have concluded that the location of the RACES operating position at United Hospital is a poor choice. It is literally in a corner of a busy public space: the ER/clinic waiting room. The radio operator needs to be located somewhere away from crowds and accessible to those in the hospital who need to send and receive messages.
None of the EOC radio operators wore headsets. It is counterproductive for several radios to all be blaring at once. Headsets should be used if they exist and procured if they do not.
Several operators were not comfortable with formal NTS traffic. Fortunately others were able to help them out. However, in a real emergency, time can't be wasted on explaining the NTS format, which is quite simple to master.
In hindsight it has been realized that the book traffic addressed to all ECs, DECs, etc. inappropriately jumped the ARES chain of command. Traffic from an EC should only go up to the DEC, and failing to reach that individual up to the SEC, and the SM and so on.
Even though Westchester County shares borders with the Connecticut, New York City-Long Island and Northern New Jersey Sections, no contact was made with these section regarding the possible need for relief operators. Sending available operators from these areas would make much more sense than expecting people to travel from Washington County, for example.
All in the ARES organization need to understand the hierarchy and where responsibility lies for requests for help from adjacent Sections. A more appropriately worded message would have informed the DEC, et. al. of the need for relief operators and recommended a course of action.
To further complicate the issue, since RACES is organized along local government lines, the decision to request mutual aid from adjacent states has other implications both for the RACES-sponsoring government agency and the volunteers who, as things currently stand, are not insured when responding out of their jurisdiction unless a pre-existing mutual aid agreement is in place.
Something that has been a recurring problem for our group is inattention to formal logging procedure when passing tactical and formal traffic. This became apparent when trying to recreate the chronology for this report. A partial log was maintained at the EOC listing various decisions made, but it is incomplete with respect to radio activities.
Similarly, NTS traffic has a specific formal method of logging the dates and times originated, sent, received and delivered. However, when reviewing the sheaf of traffic sheets at the end of the event--both those logged at the EOC and at the author's home station it became apparent that in the rush of the moment, the forms were only partially completed.
This inattention to detail can lead to messages received and never delivered, with no means of noticing that it happened.
Besides improving on the training of operators on how to properly send, receive, and log NTS and tactical traffic, it would be extremely useful to tape record radio room activity for later analysis and recovery of lost traffic.
Proper directed net procedure was occasionally not followed. Stations participating in a directed net are required to direct all their transmissions through the net control station (NCS). This does not mean having the NCS take a message and then repeat it to the intended recipient; It does mean asking NCS for permission to send the message before doing so.
Finally, it is all-too-often forgotten that after two operators finish a communication that NCS directed them to have, that they are expected to explicitly return control to the NCS, for example by saying, ``Back to net'' or ``Out.''
The group A members (executive staff) tend to forget to keep all the members of group A in the loop as events progress. One member was not at home during the first group A call-up, was not paged, and was not subsequently called by anyone in group A until the local drill had already begun. The fact that he had not been reached was conveyed to me but I let it slip through the cracks.
Some members of the westchester-ares reflector were upset by the volume of email that was automatically generated by the drill simulation. At each six-hour interval, four lengthy text messages were sent: the bulletin, forecast, discussion and strike probabilities. In retrospect, this was too much mail and will not be repeated. Fewer, terse, to-the-point messages are required.
The call-up list had been recently updated and had only a small number of errors. Members were generally comfortable with the phone tree procedure and it is believed that very few members missed being notified.
All stations participating in the local drill were on the air on time and successfully communicating from their various locations. The Rye PD and Rye CDS locations were surveyed with an eye toward further planning an appropriate operating position. However, since no City of Rye officials were available to answer questions we were not able to determine the preferred operating positions from their perspective.
Participants reported that simplex communication is reliably achieved among the Rye PD, Rye CDS, and United Hospital (which has a rooftop RACES antenna that was installed in 1996 as part of a project coordinated by the Northern Metropolitan Hospital Association).
While too much email may have been sent, there is no doubting the usefulness of the Internet for coordinating activities such as a group activation.
The Wednesday and Friday evening bulletin transmissions included announcements of the possible hurricane threat (Wednesday) and that a group call-up would commence shortly (Friday).
Further NTS training is needed by many ARES/RACES members. We are lucky to have a high percentage of members who are well versed in NTS procedures by virtue of their regular participation in the NTS, but many members who have not learned NTS procedures would become more effective communicators by taking the time to learn them.
The network control stations and individual operators need to work on a more disciplined approach to maintaining activity logs. Again, the NTS encourages this formal logging be done by any NCS or participant who handles traffic, so it is a good source of training.
A schedule needs to be established for the group A members to make sure all are up to speed, perhaps each four or eight hours.
The thrice-weekly Amateur Radio Bulletins at 7:00 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday on 147.06 provide an effective vehicle for keeping the membership informed during an emergency. Making good use of these established bulletin slots plus possibly establishing and announcing a schedule for additional bulletins as needed should be part of the standard operating plan.
There are several collateral benefits to running a SET drill each year:
The SET deadline forced me to get out a new roster. The previous one was six months old.
A facilities information database has started growing to document the locations and characteristics of the hospital antenna and operating positions. The SET deadline helps push along the process a little more each year.
The drill afforded us the opportunity to inspect the United Hospital installation and confirm that it is still functional. We also performed preliminary surveys of the Rye PD and Rye CDS to get a feeling for where a portable or fixed antenna installation might be needed.