CARE: the Santa Cruz County CERT/ARES Radio Exercise
By Allison Hershey (KM6RMN)
Santa Cruz County has experienced quite a number of disasters over the last few decades, and one of the effects has been the rise of a vibrant disaster-preparedness community. There are a hodgepodge of organizations ranging from animal rescue to education/networking groups, all loosely affiliated with the county office of emergency services. They all work hard at what they do but have somewhat independent goals. Slowly, they have been learning to work together. Two organizations of note are local CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) and ARES groups (if you don’t know what ARES stands for, get back to your handbooks!).
There was a fair amount of cross-pollination between the two groups: CERT members were encouraged to study for their ham licenses and ARES members urged to take CERT training. Two such dual-citizens were Liz Taylor-Selling (W6LTS) and Dan Selling (N6RJX), both active organizers. Additionally, Liz lobbied to get CERT volunteers who were not inclined to become hams trained up in radio communication with MURS radios, for which licenses are not required. Dan was integral in securing radios and providing training over the last couple of years.
As crops of CERT MURS radio operators mastered short-distance message passing through instruction and drills, Liz came to realize there needed to be integration with the existing nets forming on the ARES side of things. The two could extend each other’s communication reach in a disaster, but only if they learned to work together.
Liz and Dan discussed this with their peers. A plan slowly formed to carry out a joint exercise. They got their fellow CERT and ARES group leaders and higher-ups in the county involved, and by January 2021 started planning for the first CERT/ARES Radio Exercise (CARE). Santa Cruz County DEC Robert Ritchey (KJ6FFP) was able to clear the way with the Santa Cruz Office of Emergency Services. Roberta Joiner-Roberts (AJ6KN), a member of both CERT and ARES, was given the task of organizing the overall event, and Dawn Mackey (KM6RME), also a dual citizen, became CERT liaison. CERT group leaders around the county were encouraged to create their own response teams to go out and message back to their communication centers. The date was set for April 17.
The basic idea of the exercise was to have local CERT teams create scenarios and deploy within their groups, and then get two messages out in a series of hand-offs through the ARES conduit. CERT members would communicate with each other using their limited MURS radios and the ARES tactical network would act as a communications bridge to the county Emergency Operation Center (EOC). All steps in the ARES structure were to be carried out using ICS forms and practices.
There were eight CERT groups involved, each with one to three teams to deploy in the field. Each CERT group headquarters had an ARES ham operator on board who was tasked with receiving MURS messages from the field and passing them on a simplex channel to their assigned ARES communication post. The hams at each communication post were to copy these messages and pass them on to their designated net (north county or south county) on an assigned repeater frequency. Then the north and south county net controls would relay the messages to central operations at EOC.
CERT organizers planned their scenarios beforehand, but for purposes of the exercise they formed their action teams and gave instructions at the time of deployment. The ARES plan was done a little bit differently, with a Zoom meeting the night before to make assignments and review ICS paperwork.
The plan was a bit complex, but part of the exercise was to find out how well a branch structure would direct the flow of traffic. Would its multiple tiers facilitate or hinder information flow? Could it be counted on to sort out the usual pileups when everyone wanted to get their messages through? On the day of the exercise, while CERT groups were organizing and sending out their teams, ARES members checked in with John Gerhardt (N6QX) and Roberta Joiner-Roberts on the CARE resource net and took their places in the information relay tree. Many of the participants sailed through the event without a hitch. Lisa Schallop (KN6IAB) said her CERT team had a great time testing their MURS radios. And she got her messages through. One team got its assignment done and signed off so quickly the planners wondered if there was a mistake.
But being the first CERT/ARES exercise of this kind for the county, things did not always go as planned. Some groups had difficulties with reception on assigned frequencies. A few messages didn’t get through to county EOC. For south county net operators, there was a surprise when the Watsonville Emergency Airlift Command Team joined in. They had been invited earlier in the season to operate with their own simulated activation but not quite integrated into the ARES communication structure due to some planning delays. This resulted in a short period of confusion but ended up being an excellent teaching moment about the surprises that await even the best-planned action in a real emergency.
To paraphrase EC Bob Fike (KO6XX), a former police dispatcher, the glitches that occurred were a positive sign of success. He said the point of initial exercises are to find the rough spots and learn how to make things work better. Real events are always chaotic. That’s the norm. No matter how much people plan… “neat and organized is never going to happen.”
There were many discussions following the CARE event. The takeaway was that it was an ambitious exercise with many moving parts. All the participants learned: strengths and limitations and of equipment, transmitters, and propagation; how well a branch structure would work in a situation with widespread traffic; dealing with surprises and interruptions in flow; how to work cooperatively; and practice, practice, practice. Several ideas were hatched from the shortcomings for strengthening message ‘triage’ skills and may soon be added to ARES weekly nets.
As Bob Fike put it, the point of any disaster exercise is to (1) achieve effectiveness in the midst of chaos (2) get along with each other and (3) learn how to play together in a disaster situation. In these, and Bob’s earlier observations, CARE fulfilled its function.
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