Don Sanders at the Oglala disasters communication center. Photo by Trina Blanks.
Subject: The ARRL Letter, Vol 18, No 24
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 15:49:29 -0400
The ARRL Letter
Vol. 18, No. 24
June 11, 1999
Friday, June 4, was not a good day in the Northern Black Hills region of South Dakota. For starters, sometime before noon a critical fiber optic link was severed as a result of a construction mishap. That took out telephone service--including 911 and cellular--for all of two counties and part of a third. The outage also prompted a call for communications assistance to area amateurs from the Red Cross. The City of Lead Emergency Operations Center, home of the Northern Hills Amateur Radio Club's KC0BXH, remained fully activated during the entire 19-hour telephone blackout. Hams handled health and welfare traffic, emergency dispatching and coordination, among other traffic.
"In recent years there has been an over-reliance on hard-wired communication systems and cell phones," Lead's Certified Emergency Manager Jerome Harvey, N0ZBR, told the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper. Area hams, Harvey said, "are the 'go-to' folks when all the latest technology bites the dust."
Tim Eggers of the City of Lead Fire Department said the telephone outage affected all of Lawrence and Pennington counties and part of Meade County.
As if that weren't enough for one day, severe storms led to activation of a SKYWARN net that afternoon. Weather spotters provided quick information about threats to the Lead-Deadwood area. And, later that same day, a tornado struck the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation-Oglala, disrupting telephone service there for an extended period. The storm left one person dead and many injured, in addition to damaging homes. Hams, under the leadership of ARES volunteer Don Sanders, W0KTL, established a base station at Red Cross headquarters in Pine Ridge and helped to coordinate the Red Cross emergency rescue and response effort.
"Basically, they didn't have much of any communication there at all," Sanders said. Hams accompanied Red Cross workers to visit homes in the sparsely populated area and report to Red Cross Headquarters on what they found. Sanders said two teams of three hams spent two days in Oglala. Some local hams continue to support the effort.
The response team sent by ARES to assist in Oglala, included personnel cross-trained in Amateur Radio communication, severe weather operations, CPR, first aid, and disaster operations. Physician William Schnurr, KI0OZ, reportedly found himself in the middle of trying to provide critical medical care to those injured in Oglala and using his radio skills to attempt to coordinate ambulance response to the disaster area.
Three repeaters owned by the Black Hills Amateur Radio Club, W0BLK, were among those pressed into emergency service for the occasion. All operation took place on VHF.
ARES member Jamey Tollefson, N0PFS, told the Pioneer that heavy rains earlier in the week contributed to the problems for hams involved in emergency response and damage assessment activities following the tornadoes in Oglala. "They had six inches of rain in the last two days, so just getting around is very difficult as much of the damage took place in very rural areas," Tollefson told reporter Scott Randolph. "A lot of the roads are either washed out or barely passable due to the precipitation."
Operating from the Lead EOC, ARES tied information together from around the Northern Hills area mitigating the lack of phone communication. In all, 15 hams participated in the emergency response. ARES personnel logged approximately 190 duty hours--an estimated contribution to the local community of just under $50,000 in equipment and manpower costs.
"It all kinda came off at one time," Sanders said. "We were pretty busy."--from Northern Hills ARC reports and a Black Hills Pioneer article by Scott Randolph, used with permission
Don Sanders at the Oglala disasters communication center. Photo by Trina Blanks.