Regional Drill — November 2, 2024

Time To Practice!!!!!

If a fire is coming, can you quickly notify EVERY ONE of your neighbors? After an earthquake or a sudden evacuation can you tell First Responders, “We’ve got 4 hurt and 10 missing?”

Each year in October, Amateur Radio Emergency Services (ARES) conducts a drill of emergency communications. This year, South Skyline Emergency Organization is organizing a REGIONAL DRILL SATURDAY MORNING 11/02/2024.

Goals

1. Get as many neighborhoods to participate as possible.

2. For “established” neighborhoods that have done this before:

   1. Make sure your directory is correct and you can reach everyone
   2. Train someone new to help coordinate the event and report results. Don’t always rely on the same people!

3. For “new” neighborhoods just getting started:

   1. Simply get as many immediate neighbors together, and agree on ways of communicating. You can use our guide to neighborhood organization. Every neighborhood should try and contact ALL their residents as quickly as possible and make sure everyone is “ok”.
   2. We’re giving a prize of 4 GMRS/Ham radios to the 2 largest new neighborhoods to participate.

How to Participate (SUPER EASY)

• Before 11/2, update your neighborhood directory, and consider how you will reach out to your neighbors: messaging, email, phone, radio, in person. Keep in mind in a real emergency you’ll have to try a couple of things, and be prepared to do that too during the drill.

• On Saturday 11/2:

  • You don’t even need to be home. Just respond when contacted!
  • At 10:30am each neighborhood will try and get hold of one another however they wish as quickly as practical. It’s ok for someone to vouch for family members or immediate neighbors.
  • Then between 11:30 and 1pm, report back on how many you found — say “13 out of 17 people.”

How to Report Back

Tell us which neighborhood you are, and that you contacted X people out of Y total people. Use whichever of these works for you:

1. GMRS radio — contact the Longridge Repeater (channel 48 if preprogrammed) at Portola Heights 462.600 / 467.600 / 114.8 — see Neighborhood Frequencies

2. Ham radio — contact CMD31 at 146.730 Offset - CTSS 114.8 T Sql — see the Communications Plan

3. WinLink email — send to kd6uca@winlink.org. The Subject Line MUST be: //WL2K O/ Emergency Drill <Name of Neighborhood> — this message will be delivered by Ham Radio.

4. Cell phone — we are experimenting with receiving cell phone traffic at our Communications Trailer site. You can try calling 650-733-5313. (In spite of everything we may say elsewhere, if the cell phone still works, go ahead and try!)

5. If you eventually find the stragglers, you can email the update later as in #3.

Drill Results

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 — a good test of knowing who your neighbors are, proving you can find them, and testing your ability to communicate in an emergency. The drill 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 Ham, GMRS, WinLink, cell phone/texting, or satellite/microwave internet. In an emergency, depending on anything that requires wires on poles is generally not a successful strategy. So conducting this as a radio effort, whether analog or digital, was very important. For many of our neighborhoods, low-power GMRS radios were successfully used to poll everyone — a stable and reliable approach for many years now. WinLink was used extensively 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 of simple radio links.

• La Honda — An exciting development was Rita Jaramillo’s organizational efforts, who handily won our prize of free radios for new neighborhoods. The La Honda Mutual Assistance Group is composed of several dozen households of older residents in and around La Honda who have emergency phone trees. Rita organized one of these trees to join the drill, and at the same time organized her immediate neighbors around the Scenic/Autumn crossroads. These groups reported with 11 and 22 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 involved — with GMRS radios provided by SSEPO, the neighborhoods can experiment with that option as well.

• Rocky Creek continued with its development of a 100% digital emergency communication approach. New this session was a texting group that can accommodate all 90 adults in the neighborhood, with both iPhone and Android able to join on equal footing — leveraging the new RCS support in iOS 18. As with Rita’s neighborhoods, people are very comfortable texting, and messages are received almost instantaneously. The RCS-based texting group turns out to be an excellent way of getting something important to everyone right now. This clearly depends on the resilience of internet connectivity, which in turn depends on having redundant connectivity options at both the neighborhood and household level. In this neighborhood, the geography encourages redundancy given diverse radio-based ISPs (Starlink, Etheric, etc.), though more work remains at the household level. With strong neighborhood engagement, great progress was made this year.

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