Santa Cruz County Drill 4/29/2023
SSEPO frequently organizes county wide drills in San Mateo County such as the Great Shakeout in 2021. This year we have started participating in similar drills in Santa Cruz County, specifically in the San Lorenzo Valley. These drills make sense for our region because emergency response and dispatch in the Santa Cruz County portion of the South Skyline area comes from this region. For this year's drill we focused on participating at a radio level, and verifying connectivity. Our goal is to get the Santa Cruz County parts of the South Skyline area participating in these drills.
The April 29th drill followed this format (focusing on areas with established CERT teams centered on the Bonny Doon area):
This is a recap of the County Wide Communication Exercise which will begin on April 29th at 10 am.
At that time, the ARES net controls will open a net from the radio room at the county Emergency Operations Center in Santa Cruz. There will be four repeaters available. OR3 has agreed to activate DSW's for this exercise.
Also at 10:00 am; CERT communications officers and Neighborhood coordinators will begin a roll call of members on their MURS channels. Neighborhood users will be asked to stand by for a message, CERT teams will be asked to report to their rally point by 11 AM.
Neighborhood coordinators will call into the Net and report the number of MURS check-ins. They will then be given the message from OR3 to report back to their group. At this time they may ask to be cleared from the net.
CERT team members will receive a text message at 10:30 am to activate and report to their rally points by 11:00 am .
CERT communication officers will check in and report to the ham Net, when they are ready, with the number of MURS contacts and the number of volunteers available at the rally point some time after 11:00 am. They will be given the message from OR3 and will communicate it back to their MURS check-ins and the members at the rally point. CERT communications officers may request to clear from the net at this point.
ARES members are invited to deploy as a mobile station to a public facility of their choice and check in to the net to test their equipment and check the usability of their signal. They will be asked for their location, their radio type and what kind of antenna they are using. A bonus will be to report the number of parking spaces. ( if the facility would ever be considered as an evacuation site). This check in can be anytime between the 10 am start and the 12 noon end of the exercise but 10 to 10:30 and 11:00 to 11:30 are likely to be times of high net traffic.
The net will close and the exercise will be complete at 12:00 noon.
The test went off as designed. SSEPO participated via our Communications trailer manned by Bryan Osborne. We had good connectivity, and there was praise for clear easy to understand check-ins. One major learning is that having a lot of MURS traffic causes the stations with better line of sight coverage to step on the transmissions from other stations. This is something that will require more attention - particularly if Las Cumbres joins in, with it's commanding location above the valley.
Next step will be to organize more community participation in these drills in our area.