From Mike Brown  KE4FGF District Emergency Coordinator, SWGA

Good evening All,
Attached is a copy of the proposed SET exercise for October 2009.  SET 2009.pdf

If you were at the State ARES meeting in Forsyth, you heard Gene mention he was forming a committee to get a statewide exercise together to really test out our resources. As you'll read below in Gene's note, I was one of 4 people selected for this task.

The committee has been tossing this idea around for slightly over a month, and the recent storms kept putting this on the back burner, but we finally have a workable plan. What I need for you to do now is read through this and let me know what your thoughts about it are, as well as what local scenarios you think would best put our SWGA ARES group to the test.

> When I was an EC, the first SET we did was with Thomas County Fire Rescue, which, along with Archbold Hospital, are the predominant agencies Thomas ARES answers to. The local EMA, or county Emergency Manager if you will, is also the county Fire Chief, and what he and I wanted to do was prove to both groups that we not only could work together, but to iron out early what problems we had, so in the real thing, everything would be "old hat" and thus flow smoothly.

> A number of people in the ARES group had also been asking me what should be in their "Jump Kit", so I styled the exercise to show them what they'd need. A number of eyes were opened as we had "Murphy's Law" in full effect ALL day long. The Chief was impressed by the way we worked through the problems, and the result of that has been much tighter cooperation, and fringe benefits like an antenna and hardline feed on the EOC tower for our operations.

> Several of you have asked for the best way to get more involvement from your EMA people, and this exercise may help get a foot in the door. I'd also suggest here that if your group is participating in the Field Day exercise, that you should invite your local emergency management people, or even the county commissioners to view your exercise. I've also found that if the invitation extends to a plate of BBQ chicken with all the "fixins" works well as an attendance tool...use your best judgement.

> If you'd like to schedule a meeting with your EMA director beforehand and would like me to attend as a back-up, I'll do my best to make myself available.

> Note also that there is a reference to whether your "county plan" makes a provision for prolonged power outages. Without asking, I'm going to guess that for the most part, any county plans probably exist in the mind of the EC, and not actually on paper. After all, the EC ultimately knows who his group responds to when the time comes. But, does your AEC know what this plan is? And if this was the real thing, and both you and the AEC are MIA, and I had to come in to help, would there be a WRITTEN plan in place for me to put into action in your absence? If the answer is no, you may want to start thinking about this, and working together on the SET scenario may well help all the SWGA ARES groups to get their plans on paper and passed out so that EVERYONE knows what would need to happen.

> It is something of an arduous task, but a necessary one if we are to succeed as a group. Let me know if I can help you with this.

I look forward to your comments....73 de Mike

Mike Brown, KE4FGF
District Emergency Coordinator, SWGA
Georgia Section ARES
ke4fgf@surfsouth.com
229-226-5060 229-224-5185 (cell)

From Gene Clark, W4AYK, ARRL Section Emergency Coordinator for Georgia

Member of ARES:
In January at Forsyth I mentioned to many of you that I wanted to plan a section-wide theme for the annual Simulated Emergency Test (SET) due on October 2, 3 and 4. I asked Lynn Bianco, KN4YZ to chair a committee including Charles Pennington, K4GK, Terry Jones, W4TL, and Mike Brown, KE4FGF. They have developed an excellent plan, I think. Lynn has referred it to me for early publication, since it will require a lot of planning at the local levels. You will notice that while the theme is widespread power failure for a prolonged time, we will mainly do actual work with communications. However we hope that each of us will consider and plan how to manage other obvious aspects, such as food and drinking water, since these are very real potential problems. Please download the attached document and study it. Since I do not have the data to contact all in ARES please further share it with your members now.

The subsequent act of reporting will offer us much opportunity to work with the plan, but also for evaluations and further publication. I will be asking Charles, K4GK, the Net Manager for Georgia ARES to plan use of the ARES net(s) for check-ins and perhaps for referral of some of the reporting. I believe many even outside of amateur radio will be interested in the outcomes. Thank you for your interest in emergency preparedness and communications.

Eugene C. Clark, W4AYK,
ARRL Section Emergency Coordinator for Georgia W4AYK@arrl.net.
H 229-888-1090, C 229-344-1859