Sunday… was a great day for SDGARES…..but more on that later….

 

First and foremost… Miramar is about as good as it gets as a training opportunity.. it is live fire.. you are potentially saving lives but you have several hours of low action hands on training before it gets real…  …..Every day starts off very slowly… we have lots of time every morning to train scribes and net control operators… Our policy of rotating as many net control operators and scribes through each position really pays dividends as I will explain…..

 

In the days before SDGARES implemented the Incident Command System (ICS)… Net Control was the personal property of one or 2 senior ARES people who believed that it was their right to control all nets… However… in a true emergency… the chances of those few senior people being in the correct position to assume net control is at best remote…  However under ICS,, everyone needs to be cross trained at every position…so that the first person on the air can assume net control…

 

Well ICS worked very well at Miramar…

 

But what made Sunday so special for me were the 3 young hams (Doug KG6WLR, Marc KG6YYF and Marcus KI6FRO) from Mt Carmel High School and the two Venture Scouts.  (Josh KI6FCN and Matt KI6EZM)… They trained at all positions and assumed all levels of responsibility… and even more important…

 

DURING THE AFTERNOON PERIOD WHEN WE FOUND AND REUNITED 18 MISSING CHILDREN … NET CONTROL WAS MANNED CONTINUOUSLY BY HAMS UNDER 18 YEARS OLD…  (albeit some adults hovered in the background just case)

 

They vectored the SDGARES search teams to the correct grids… they managed the information flow to the Search teams.. … One of them even figured out how to use the archaic (I will discus this below) and ineffective packet system… they did an incredibly professional job in a high stress situation….

 

So why was it such a great day for SDGARES… mainly because we got our systems working to perfection… SDGARES Search Teams got so good at finding children that we usually cleared the incidents before we could even communicate the reports to RACES.

 

The morning was very slow… as usual.. We only reunited 2 missing children… but the last 2 hours of the day.. All hell broke loose… we reunited 18 children including a 4 year old girl who was found wandering in traffic outside of the flite line…We also found 1 Alzheimer’s patient and another missing Downs Syndrome person.

 

We learned a lot of things which I hope to summarize in a new online after action report system ARES should have operational this week…

In my opinion as a professional engineer who has designed many communications systems the most visible technical failure was the archaic packet system that RACES insisted we continue to use… yes the hardware worked but point is to communicate information in a timely manner…. the packet system and the procedural steps we had to follow to file a report was so slow and difficult to use.. that invariably ARES Searchers found the missing child before we were able to even communicate the missing persons report to RACES over packet… this email is not the place to detail this technical failure… so I will follow up a detailed explanation in my after action report along with detailed procedures to fix the problem for next year…

 

It is really obvious that SDGARES needs a permanent Mobile Command Post…if it is to be able to carry out its missions.. taking 36 man hours just to set up and then spending countless hours during the show reading manuals to program radios is not acceptable during a real emergency…..

 

Summary:

 

I really want to thank Don and Libby Bloom for letting us use their RV as a Mobile Command Post… and John Movius for offering us his RV as well…

 

Without their generosity and the generosity of Tom at HRO in lending us equipment and Bio Matrix in funding the cart we would not have been so successful

 

Over the 3 days of the show…We had 46 responders on Base and 19 covering the hospitals.  Many of the responders worked multiple shifts. 

 

During the 3 days our responders provided backup communications from the Air Show to 9 area hospitals for County Emergency Services.  Our responders also worked with the Military Police and RACES to reunite 44 lost children with their parents, plus 4 Alzheimer patients and 2 seriously handicapped Downs Syndrome patients with their care givers.  In addition our responders were able to provide on scene communications for numerous minor incidents as well as handicapped transport requests and in one case an SDGARES responder was able to stop a serious domestic violence incident by quickly radioing to bring Military Police to the scene. 

 

In total our responders worked about 1,250 man hours for the show.

 

 

And finally….the photo shoot of Day 3 is below