ARES Call on to do Windshield Damage Assessment after winds whip through the area.
May 26, 2011 Storm brings wind and destruction to the area.
Vigo County ARES was called upon to do windshield damage assessment after a storm came through the area and took down trees and left over 10000 without power.
ARES was asked to provide EMA with some preliminary damage reports to get the ball rolling for relief funding from FEMA.
ARES was assigned a large section of the city and county to inspect and report back on damage to the area.
Our local team had been through a damage assessment training class and responded to the call.
ARES Also passed out IDHS applications for homeowner assistance to people they saw out in the damaged area.
Once again proving that Amateur Radio is alive and strong in the area.
Vigo County ARES was called upon to do windshield damage assessment after a storm came through the area and took down trees and left over 10000 without power.
ARES was asked to provide EMA with some preliminary damage reports to get the ball rolling for relief funding from FEMA.
ARES was assigned a large section of the city and county to inspect and report back on damage to the area.
Our local team had been through a damage assessment training class and responded to the call.
ARES Also passed out IDHS applications for homeowner assistance to people they saw out in the damaged area.
Once again proving that Amateur Radio is alive and strong in the area.
ARES handles Communication for NLE Disaster Drill
May 18, 2011DISASTER DRILLImagine, a 7.7 Valley quake …Lisa TriggThe Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — A natural disaster strikes the Wabash Valley — an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 on the New Madrid fault line, followed by a 6.0 quake on the Wabash Valley fault line.
As part of the local scenario, the Vigo County Emergency Management Agency is simulating how to deal with the collapse of the Vigo County Courthouse. But while coordinating that response between city and county agencies, a call comes in that gives everyone pause.
Indiana State University has 11,000 students that need to be housed while its residence halls can be inspected for damage.
That scenario came to life Tuesday as part of a multi-state exercise designed around a natural disaster.
Vigo EMA Director Dorene Hojnicki, leading the local tabletop exercise at the Hulman Field EMA center, coordinated input from multiple agencies — police, fire, medical, Red Cross and the Vigo County Animal Coalition.Total housing on the ISU campus is about 4,500, so that immediately knocks down a response to a huge 11,000 campus population. Depending on the time of day that the disaster strikes, students could be in their dorm rooms, in classrooms, labs or other areas. Faculty and staff could also be affected.
Getting sleeping students out of the dorms would be a challenge, one responder noted.
ISU has an emergency notification system, but if phone service is down, so is that system.
There will likely be people stuck in elevators, Hojnicki adds.
“How about using Hulman Center, the walkway area that circles the building,” Assistant Director J.D. Kesler suggests for temporary student housing.
“Or the triple gym on the north side of campus,” suggests another tabletop player, referring to the ISU Arena.
But those buildings would need to be checked for safety as well.
“We need to get them to a open area,” Hojnicki says, specifying the quad area near Tirey Hall. “Getting people to open areas is something we learned from the quake in Japan.”
“We can get a hold of the military for tent housing,” Kesler adds, as the simulation builds.
There would be life safety issues, especially in lab areas that contain chemicals, equipment and animals.
Who is responsible to inspect buildings for occupancy safety? Is it an engineer from ISU? The city, county or state?
Those are the type of issues the Vigo County tabletop session brought up as part of the local earthquake scenario.
The county EMA office could also handle some non-emergency telephone traffic as a backup location for the 911 operations center based in the Vigo County Security Center
In fact, if the area along the Wabash River were hard hit by the quake and the 911 center were inoperable, the EMA center might have to become the 911 operations center. That is a contingency that county officials have envisioned, but have not been able to fund to an operational level.
The EMA center, located in a former fire station near the Indiana Air Guard’s 181st Intelligence Wing based at Hulman Field, also contains a special room staffed by members of the Amateur Radio Emergency Services, or ARES.
During Tuesday’s drill, radio operators Doug Mullens, Nick Vinardi and Steve Ridge of Vigo County Task Force 7, manned the base of radio operations at EMA. Their group is an integral part of any emergency response that involves loss of communications through telephones and other media.
Their network extends to radio operations outposts at Union and Regional hospitals, the American Red Cross and 911 Dispatch during the drill. The radio operators can then coordinate responses where needed and relay messages to state and federal agencies.
“If the 800 megahertz radios go down, city police have no radio,” Mullens said of the communications blackout that could occur during a natural disaster. “The county has some VHF radios they could still use. But the other big problem is that as phones go down, you lose all landlines, cell phones and 911.”
Getting correct information to the public is also going to be critical, Mullens said. Some people would panic, and some folks wouldn’t know where to go or what to do to stay safe.
ARES played a big part in communications for the EMA center during the February ice storm that knocked out power around the Wabash Valley. In one instance, radio operator Ridge used amateur radio to assist with the evacuation of a nursing home that had lost power, as medical and safety personnel were summoned to the scene.
During Tuesday’s disaster scenario, the ARES team was also linked to the web-based emergency operations center located in Clay County. The radio operators could see the same messages and alerts that were being broadcast around the state and region, allowing them to pass along information as appropriate.
“We are the eyes and ears for EMA,” Mullens said.
As the day of mock disaster continued, the state interjected some situations into the local response exercise.
The EMA center learned that four of the six bridges across the Wabash River had collapsed. Involved were both Interstate 70 bridges, one direction of the U.S. 40 bridge and one direction of the Indiana 63 bridge.
And the EMA center, as part of the drill, sent a request to the state asking for meals to feed the evacuated ISU students.
The information gathered through the responses to the local situation is providing data that local and state authorities can use to better plan for worst, while hoping for the best.