SANTA CRUZ ARES

...SANTA CRUZ ARES Runs Another Successful SAFE Event By Allison Hershey (KM6RMN, PIO) Santa Cruz - area ARES organizers ran their fourth SAFE (Scavenge Around Field Exercise) on January 9, 2022. Designed in the early days of the pandemic with social distancing in mind, this event allowed participants to get outdoors and communicate with a multi-location incident command team while honing their emergency radio skills. I have previously covered SAFE events from a field participant's point of view, but here I will take a closer look at the Incident Command side of the exercise. Briefly, the first three SAFE events were run in 2020 and early 2021. Any local licensed radio operators interested in emergency preparedness were invited to participate. At event start time, participants checked in to a resource net. Once checked, in they were directed to one of two tactical nets to receive a series of assignments to drive to locations and report specific information about them. The observation questions were simple, such as, "what color is the welcome sign at this particular address," and could be done without leaving the vehicle. Upon completion of their assignments, participants returned to the resource net to demobilize, drove home, and contacted the resource net one more time to report safe arrival. A few field operators' locations were tracked through APRS, bringing a new dimension to the event. This aspect of the exercise will be covered next time, as more participants will learn this technology in the coming year. Preparation for SAFE IV was started in the fall 2021. After Santa Cruz ARES members expressed interest in repeating the exercise, Santa Cruz County DEC John Gerhardt, N6QX, recruited volunteers to form a core organizing committee that met online and exchanged emails. Many of the materials had been created in previous events and kept in a shared Google Drive folder: ICS (Incident Command System) Forms 202, 205, 214 for instruction and reporting, vetted participant assignments, scripts, radio protocol pointers, and the all-important Exercise Location and Tracking Sheet. This shared Google spreadsheet was created by JoMarie Faulkerson, KM6URE, to be the "whiteboard" of central operations, displaying the progress of every participant to the core team in their virtual incident command center. Entries made by any team scribe (spreadsheet editor) would be displayed instantly.Поделитесь этой страницей

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