What do I do in a local emergency

The question's been asked many times on the repeater and at meetings. Some get excited over it, some get angry about it. Whatever your demeanor is on the subject, the fact is that it's really the Town of Falmouth that decides when we do it and what we do. It's not something we can take into our own hands and it's governed by a complex set of rules that starts with the FCC and their description of Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Services, continues on down through the maze known as FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), and eventually rattles on down to another bureaucratic maze known as MEMA (Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency). By the way, you can't find MEMA on the Internet directly, it's buried in a maze of Java server pages and portals starting with the State's web site. You will find a link to MEMA on the FEMA index of State EMA organizations, but the rest is left as an exercise to the student. If you search for MEMA on the Massachusetts State home page, you'll eventually find it. A good indication of the state of the State? Try starting here. Finally the maze dead ends with the Town of Falmouth, Emergency Preparedness. You'll find this just as informative as the MEMA information because the Town page mostly points at MEMA pages if you start digging at the links there. Does that tell you something?

But, never mind all that, our role, believe it or not, is actually clear and even exists in writing (see FARA Emergency Communications Manual). This is a pdf file and you can either view it directly if your computer has Adobe's Acrobat Reader installed on it (left click on link), or you can download it and save it somewhere on your computer (right click on it and left click on save target as).

An emergency can only be declared by the Board of Selectmen, namely the Chairman. One of the first people notified is the Fire Chief because the Emergency Operations Center (a bare conference room in the new Fire Station on Main St. - directly across the street from Gifford St.) comes under the purview of the Fire Department. It's the Chief who then notifies FARA through our Emergency Coordinator and his alternate. Currently our Coordinator is Henry, K1WCC and his alternate is Ben, K2LYE. From there the call up tree is used to notify sworn-in FARA volunteers to find sufficient people to man the shelter and to set up the equipment and run the net control in the EOC room. From that point on the 2m and 440 repeaters fall under the auspices of the Town of Falmouth and are governed by FCC part 97.407.

That also brings up another interesting point. You are all supposed to be aware of what's in Part 97, it's the bible by which we live or die as amateur radio service licensees. We urge all of you to have a current copy of Part 97 around your shack, or better yet on your computer for quick reference and convenient searching. Part 97 resides within the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), under Title 47 (FCC). You can get there by going to the home page for the National Archives, but to save you quite a bit of fiddling, the direct link to 47 CFR Part 97 is provided here. Here you will find all sections of Part 97 (Amateur Radio Regulations) in both raw text and pdf form. This pointer references the current version of 47 CFR which is dated October 2004.