ARES District 24 SET (Simulated
Emergency Test) 2006
After–Action Report
Date of Activity: 31 October 2006
Duration of Activity: 4 hours, 35
min.
Description of Activity:
Each year, ARES District 24
runs a simulated emergency test (SET) to evaluate our preparedness and
capabilities to respond to one of our served agencies should there be a real
need. Although the SET is simulated, it
is expected that our members treat this event as if it were real. This is a way to not only measure the
district as a whole, but individually measure one’s preparedness.
This year’s activity took
place on 31 October 2006, Halloween.
Kids were going door to door ‘trick or treating’. Operation Great Pumpkin leveraged off these
activities and made it part of the event.
General Situation:
A massive ice and windstorm
is moving through the area mid-afternoon on 31 October. This has left
much of the area without power and limited phone service. The mountain-based
repeaters normally used by D-24 are out of service and not expected to be back
on until the weekend.
Served Agency Request:
Douglas County Sheriff’s
Office (DCSO) has been receiving reports of roving bands of small vandals and
beggars in disguises and accompanied at times by adults. They have requested
D-24 members to monitor these activities in the following areas and report back
to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) which has been activated for this
event:
Parker
Castle Pines North
Meadows
Specifically, they want
reports of the following:
1.
Weather conditions on a half-hourly
basis
2.
Street activity
a.
Size of moving bands of suspicious
persons
b.
Number of above
i.
Accompanied by adults
ii.
Not accompanied by adults
c.
Traffic conditions
3.
Any signs of vandalism or crime against
property
Built into the exercise were
several non-planned events to further test the district’s abilities to perform
under changing conditions. They were:
1. Wide area phone outage, both land line and cell phone
2. Failure of the one remaining wide-area repeater
3. Closure of I-25 as well as most roads in the county.
Description of Served Agency Participation: None
Number of ARES Participants: 17
Name and Call of Participants:
KØEWF -
Eric Freund
ABØWV -
Frank Watervoort
KAØVKM -
KCØUBD - Robert Wareham
WBØEVA - Dick bush
WØBO -
Jim Hertzel
WØHNC -
Andre Roy
W9BNO -
Rick Anderson
KA9ODE - Garry Hefty
WB5PJB - Gary Sutton
WØBG -
Mark Kelley
N2PDQ -
Dirk Malsch
NØIVN -
Ron Hranac
NQØR - Randy
Reynard
W6AUN -
Perry Lundquist
KCØMHT -
KBØVJY - Mikey Martin
Person-hours of Amateur Service: 77 hours,
55 minutes + planning time that went into creating this event.
Goals of the Activity: Determine
readiness of the district, adaptability to flow with a changing situation and
have fun while doing so.
Were the Goals Accomplished: Yes
What Went Well:
As a training exercise,
various members got an opportunity to practice/experience what it is like to
operate as Net Control. I was very
pleased to find that proper protocol was followed. I was extremely pleased to see that based on
the weekly nets we hold, that lessons were learned and carried over into the
SET. After Net Control function was
passed to a new operator, the new Net Control operator looked for and found someone
to act as “back up Net Control Operator”.
Proper net etiquette was
followed. I measured this by the number
of ‘doubles’ that took place during the exercise. There were very few doubles. Members continue to use “Q” signals, an area
which will be addressed through more training.
What Needs Improvement / Lessons Learned / Additional
Training Needed:
As with all events, either
real or simulated, something is learned.
This event was no different. I
will attempt to take them from the top.
The initial activation did
not go smoothly because a standing procedure was not followed as expected. D-24 leadership has already started
discussing ways to streamline the process for a served agency to reach D-24
staff.
Text messaging proved to be
a tool that needs further development.
Again, D-24 leadership has started the discussion on ways to utilize
this tool and will be looking into ways to add it to our training and
discussions with our general membership.
Faced with a wide area
repeater and phone outage, I later had to reflect what would have happened if
we had received a real call out? How
would we have gotten in contact with our membership to respond? I have no doubt that should a wide area phone
outage occur and DCSO wants us, they would have sent a squad car to someone’s
house to activate us. OK, they got us,
now how do we activate ourselves? Again,
this is a topic that needs to be discussed at the leadership level and a plan
put into place to train the district’s members.
When we experienced another
repeater failure during the SET, we moved operations to the portable
repeater. Although we had established
backup operating frequencies should we experience a failure, the move was
clumsy at best. This was due to 1) lack
of planning by the general membership, 2) members’ unfamiliarity with own
equipment and 3) forgetting something (another way of saying planning). All D-24 frequencies should be preprogrammed
into all radios at all times. We had some
members forget what the CTCSS Tone and repeater offsets were. We even had a MC (me) who forgot to apply a
negative offset on his own radio and was trying to
bring up the repeater in simplex mode.
This issue can be addressed
by training and as a topic of discussion at our weekly nets. Our monthly face-to-face meeting is a good
place to test members to see if radios are ready and help those that need
assistance.
One observation of the SET
was that Q-signals were frequently used.
There is a need to stress to the general membership that this goes
against our ICS training. This can be
address during our weekly nets as well as re-addressing this topic in our
training sessions.
General Comments:
All in all, this was a great
event. We stumbled yet we got back on
our feet. We identified areas where we
can grow in our capabilities and found new ways to achieve our goals that will
prove useful in the future. We had fun
and found out that Perry (W6AUN) and Tom (KØVKM) have too much fun.
Mikey Martin – KBØVJY
ARES District 24 Logistics
Officer