How Will Our Emergen

How Will Our Emergency Network Look? Where do you fit in?


Ron Thomas

I have people stopping me telling me they have purchased their new FRS radios. The last person paid $15 for 2 of them at WalMart. Some of you know them as Walkie Talkies and have them in your motor homes for backing up the rig or carrying on a conversation while you are caravanning. They are not CB radios but they work similar and have a shorter range. Today most of them have ranges of 2 to 5 miles. Our community is a mile long so they are ideally suited for us. To the left is a picture of the FRS radios the CERT teams use. All of them look similar.

FRS stands for Family Radio Service. People use them a lot to keep track of their kids especially at amusement parks. We are going to use them here in a variety of ways. True many will feel it is not worth the effort but I’m thinking you buy 2 and split the cost with a neighbor. You’ve just bought yourself a pretty good security package for nothing.

Here are some of the ways we will use our system...

• We lose power in the park and telephones and cell phones... We are still linked by our FRS radios.


• A neighborhood Watch patrol asks a resident to call in suspicious activity. In fact block captians might even monitor their radios all the time or take turns with their assistants.


• You live alone are injured or ill .. you have another means of communication.


• In an Emergency the CERT team will be able to give our community advisories over our network. You will be able to call for help.

Nearly every few days someone comes up with a fresh new idea on how to use the system. It’s so dirt cheap that you shouldn’t even fret over whether you should buy one or not.... Just do it.

I would like to talk about the radio itself now. Most of them come with 22 channels. Each one of those channels are further split into 36 privacy codes each. A privacy channel puts your group on another channel so that you don’t cross talk with other groups. For instance, right now we are monitoring CH 14 but usually everybody just picks a channel and starts talking and that could make our network useless up here so we will be using privacy code 14 which will make our network pretty much by itself. So our park will be on CH 14 Privacy Code 14 and will be on your display as 14.14. As time goes on we hope to have volunteers monitoring it 24/7.

Some time in July we will have CERT team members helping residents learn how to use their new radios. So if yours looks to complicated don’t fret we have been trained on them and will help you master it.