Communicating an Ala

Communicating an Alarm or Warning...

Ron Thomas

As you know, I have been researching a doable system for our community. It occurs to me we have many features in place. We could use what we have if it were not for bottle necks.

First off, let me talk to you about the Neighborhood Watch Phone Tree operation. This system has been a hit and miss situation since it began. Why? Some are notified and others are not and that cannot be helped. The reason is it starts with the block captain coordinator being notified about something. That person calls either all the block Captains (36 ... a two hour process) or calls a few who call others and so on. The block Captains reached call their neighbors. More time.. Block Captains find it hard just to take the message and move on .. They ask questions further slowing the operation. If that weren’t enough the tree begins to lose branches as it runs into people not at home. This often leads to whole segments of the community not being notified. So here we have identified two bottle necks.

Enter the concept of the two way radios we asked everyone to purchase. This has it’s drawbacks and advantages. The advantage is everyone could turn on their radio and hear a continuous announcement about what the emergency is and what to do. The disadvantages are two. Keeping the radio on all the time is not feasible without an expensive battery charger and battery. Worse than that people coming to the beach yak on them enough to make it a nuisance to leave them on all the time. Still there is an offset here if everyone would buy the more expensive models with recharging systems and privacy channels I believe the radios could be left on continuously without local visitors jamming them up. That would allow one person to broadcast the alert continuously for say half an hour. We could even give the person a small tape recorder to do it with.

Now you may begin to see other possibilities. Say you don’t want to turn the radio on unless you know there is an alert you don’t want to go to the additional expense of buying more expensive equipment and leaving it on all the time.. That would mean there would have to be something that happens to cause you to turn on your radio. Phoning isn’t quick enough as we have demonstrated and leaves a lot of people out. The dialer system has merit unless the phone systems are down or the electric power that runs the dialer is out. The radios will work but something has to get you to turn it on. Now there are some solutions we have thought up to get you to turn the radio on at the right time but each has it’s drawbacks.

You will recall the idea of getting people to turn on their car horns through out the park which would be the signal for you to turn on your radio? This was not enthusiastically received through out the community and suffers from the drawback of what if the phones are out? How do you tell folks to turn on their horns? Then an idea came forward that the CERT team using Cell phones would alert each other (there is only 8 of them) and they would have bullhorns with sirens and would drive throughout the community announcing the emergency and telling everyone to tune to CH 5 for information and instructions. This idea seems like it would work. They think they could get everyone notified in less than 20 minutes. But there are complications that need to be worked out so let us set them out for discussion here.

First, what would be so important that an alert like this would be called? Would we need rules of the road? A tsunami coming is one end of the spectrum vs. a water outage at the other end. You can see there are degrees of importance here?

Next, Bullhorns with sirens cost $30. To do this the CERT team would like 5.

During the announcement phase the mike of the announcer will be keyed continuously to keep people from butting in on CH5 and interrupting the emergency broadcast... All will be advised to use CH6, CH7 and CH8 to communicate with Neighborhood Watch and CERT about problems they have or help needed... After everyone is notified CH 5 will again be the prime communications frequency ..two way.