Socially Distanced Radio Drill 7/26

Every year we try to have a drill to practice our Map Your Neighborhood skills and sometimes to coordinate with our local Community Emergency Response Teams. The pandemic has made such team efforts unlikely and even unsafe. This year we will focus on Communications through a Drill using walkie talkies from our homes.

We won’t be going to our gathering sites but we can form “pretend teams” on the radio. There won’t be any incident cards to find, we’ll just discuss various possibilities over the radios.

• Everyone stays at their home location, uses their radio
• Block TEAMS check in with their BASE Operator (there are 22 of these)
• BASE Operators check in with their HUB Operators (there are 5 of these)
• HUB Operators check in with STAGING Operator (Only 1 of these)
• Practice passing information through the network
• Virtual Debriefing on Zoom or on FRS Channel 5

In a real disaster, being able to communicate with your neighbors is extremely important. We’ve been trained to do this by all going to the same place to coordinate a response plan. If something major were to happen during at stay at home pandemic, we would need another way to account for everyone. We have our contact lists, but if power were to go out and cell towers overloaded, our battery operated walkie-talkies would be a much better bet than phones or email/text

We will have several opportunities (see News and Events) to practice and get our radios in working order before the drill. If you don’t know where yours are, now’s a good time to look. Please plan to participate on Sunday, July 26 from 2-4 pm. What else did you think you were going to do that day??