K7CEM-New

2019 certainly ended in a way none of our team expected.  On New Year’s Eve, Lyle Olmsted, KB7PI, passed away at Centralia Providence Hospital.  In 2008, the Centralia Police Department and Riverside Fire Authority were searching for ways to overcome the sudden and destructive forces experienced during the December 2007 area wide flood that closed Interstate 5 for three days, when we created the Centralia Amateur Radio Emergency Service team.  Its purpose at the time was to provide the Centralia EOC with backup communications should all normal comms fail during a similar disaster.

The police department created a form letter and sent it out to every one of the 450 amateur radio operators in Lewis County asking if they would consider helping with the formation of an ARES team.  Lyle Olmsted was the very first volunteer, marching into my office only hours after he received the letter in the mail.  I had no idea how important this man would become to our fledgling ARES team or to me personally over the next ten years.  Lyle arrived so quickly I had only just started to create a volunteer application form for the team.  Holding an Advanced amateur radio license and a desire to make it all work, Lyle became our first Assistant Emergency Coordinator, a post he held until a year before his passing when he stepped down to become our team advisor.

Our team’s two ARES Communications vans are a tribute to Lyle’s tenacity.  Seeing a smaller box van owned by the police department that didn’t seem to have a real purpose,  he proposed we create a mobile communications van.  I’m sure when Chief Bob Berg handed me the keys and told us to have at it, he had pretty low expectations.  Over coffee, I handed Lyle the keys and said “let’s do this”.  The smile on his face was fun to see.  Over the next year, Lyle designed the interior, sought out donations and used equipment and spent hours and hours working on every detail.  When it was done, all Chief Berg could say was “Wow”.  He was so impressed, when we asked for a second identical van so we could create a second communications van, he simply handed over the keys.

4,157 days.  Lyle served the City of Centralia and Riverside Fire Authority as a Amateur Radio Emergency Service volunteer 4,157 days.  If you’re lucky, friendships can last a lifetime.  Sometimes less.  The best friend I ever had walked into my office 4,157 days ago and simply said “I’m an Amateur Radio operator and I want to help.”

It was 56 degrees, 11 mph winds and raining hard but two weeks after our ARES team designed a 6.0 earthquake it was time to put this disaster into play.  Since we do these types of exercises fairly often, we tend to use one of our two hour training nights rather than a full day scenario.  Not much time to get everything done, but it just makes us work faster.  10 minutes into the evening everyone had their scenario, action plan, safety briefing, tactical call signs, radio frequencies and assignments so out the door we went.

In this exercise, our Emergency Operations Center and much of the downtown area sustained damage, so command and control transferred to the Riverside Fire Authorities Emergency Coordination Center across town.  Power was out in some, but not all of the area.  A 48 car train carrying crude oil managed to stop when the earthquake hit, but two cars came off the tracks and tipped over.  The train cut the community in half.  Team members had to look up the emergency response guide placard “1267” and take precautions accordingly.  A fairly large portion of the area near the train derailment needed to evacuate so two of the team mapped out multiple evacuation routes.  A mutual aid request from the county sent us to the small town of Galvin and windshield surveys became widespread.  Creating a little “havoc” of our own, several team members made up insert scenarios ranging from traffic accidents, to fires to possible overpass failures.  On top of everything else, we had our communications vans spread out and were working on some HF radio tests using 6 and 10 meter ground wave.  It was a fun evening’s work keeping net control very busy.

There is no such thing as a “perfect” disaster exercise – at least for our team – but this one was close to perfect.  We need to slow down and control our communications – something we should be good at already.  It is difficult to always remember to say “exercise, exercise, exercise” but thankfully, net control did a great job of doing that.  We didn’t have quite enough people to get everything done that we had planned but what we did get done was completed safely and correctly.  We only train in the fire department’s ECC a couple of times per year but it is a beautiful facility with lots of maps and radio equipment.  It was a good learning experience for our net control and evacuation planners.

So what’s next?  We will debrief this exercise at our next meeting and fix a few bugs we found in one of the communications vans.  We hope to turn right around and design a flood disaster scenario since flood season is here in our area.  Maybe it is time to see how well one or more of the Assistant Emergency Coordinators can design a disaster scenario.  Hmmm……..