On Saturday morning of 11/2 South Skyline Emergency Preparedness Organization with some help from the SC4 Radio club ran the annual South Skyline regional emergency drill. This was an exercise to see if we could get every neighborhood to quickly contact all their residents and report back the results. It's a good test of knowing who your neighbors are, proving you can find them, and testing your abilities to communicate in an emergency.  The test was very successful with excellent coverage north of Highway 9, including the Alpine and 84 corridors. 

* All participating neighborhoods were able to reach 90+% of their residents within the drill period, with 5 neighborhoods reaching 100%.

* The drill was executed almost entirely over radio -- whether that was Ham, GMRS, WinLink, Cell phone/texting, or satellite/microwave internet.  Keep in mind, in an emergency depending on anything that requires wires on poles is generally not a successful strategy.  So doing this as a radio effort, whether analog or digital, was very important!   For many of our neighborhoods the low power GMRS radios were successfully used to poll everyone, and this has been a stable and reliable approach for many years now. WinLink was used quite a bit to report results back. It turns out to be a very good way of bridging internet to radio connections, and its ability to route messages avoids some of the line-of-sight issues for simple radio links.   

* La Honda - an exciting development are Rita Jaramillo's organizational efforts, who handily won our prizes of free radios for new neighborhoods. The La Honda Mutual Assistance Group is composed of several dozen households of older residents in the area in and around La Honda, who have emergency phone trees.  Rita organized one of these trees to join in the drill.  At the same time, she organized her immediate neighbors around the Scenic/Autumn crossroads.  These groups reported with all 11 and 22 of their residents respectively participating.   The communities mostly participated by text messaging and reported back via WinLink.  Rita is hoping to use this effort as a springboard for getting much more of the La Honda area participating!  With the GMRS radios SSEPO provided, the neighborhoods can experiment with that option as well.  

* Rocky Creek continued with its development of a 100% digital emergency communication approach. New for this session was creating a texting group that can accommodate all 90 adults in the neighborhood with both iPhone and Android being able to join on an equal footing. This leverages the new RCS support in IOS18.  As with Rita's neighborhoods, people are very comfortable texting, and the messages are received and checked almost instantaneously.  The RCS based texting group turns out to be an excellent way of informing everyone RIGHT NOW of something important.  This clearly depends on the resilience of internet connectivity, which in turn depends on having a range of redundant connectivity options both at the neighborhood and at the household level. While in this neighborhood the geography encourages redundancy at the neighborhood level given diverse radio-based ISPs (Starlink, Etheric...), there is still more research required at the household level.  But with strong neighborhood engagement, great progress was made this year. More to come on this going forward!

All in all, this was a successful drill with good participation, with new neighborhood involvement, and some interesting new technological learnings.  And by all accounts, it turned out to be an enjoyable opportunity to bring neighbors together.

Regional Drill 11/2