Dear Editor,

I would like to bring attention to other participants in the recent Cascadia Rising Exercise.

Clint Wood was the Incident Commander (IC) at Forks Community Hospital.

Clint pulled together scenarios of realistic disasters for the drill and distributed incoming messages to the appropriate staff sections. Each of these messages dealt with a single topic, written out on a standard form of the Incident Command System, showing name of originator, name and location of destination, priority, time, date and subject. Clint, your skills were well-portrayed!

Outgoing messages were hand-carried to Char Carte in the Amateur Emergency Radio Service (ARES) Emergency Communications Center (ECC) radio room. She transmitted the messages via HAM radio to the ARES radio room at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in Forks City Hall for action and reply from the Incident Commander at that site.

In order to participate as Amateur (HAM) radio operator at the hospital, Char took a day of personal leave from her work to provide a very effective communications link between the two sites. Thank you, Char!

At La Push, as though it were a real event, Bob Bouck opened his personal HAM radio system to relay messages to and from the Tribal EOC to the State Emergency Management Division at Camp Murray. Bob used the 75-meter high frequency (HF) band to contact them on the EMD frequency and successfully sent and received messages. Well done, Bob!

At Forks City Hall ECC, a steady stream of messages evolved between the IC’s on site and the hospital and traffic to and from the Clallam County EOC in the Port Angeles courthouse and the State Emergency Management Department at Camp Murray. The ECC was plagued with equipment rebooting and degraded transmission conditions, sometimes resulting in backlogs of message handling.

The professional action of all others involved at these three sites made the drill worthwhile and very interesting.

There is an urgent and immediate need in Forks to have access to experienced or otherwise skilled radio operators, especially former Hams and agency dispatchers. When opportunities for participating occur, we will contact you. If interested, please call me at 360-374-2414 and leave your phone number on the voice mail.

John Richmond

Clallam County Amateur Radio Emergency Services (CC ARES)

Assistant Emergency Coordinator (AEC) Forks