Radio Club Keeping Communication Open During Extreme Weather
/West Virginia Emergency Management Division amateur radio club hit the airwaves to help emergency management stay informed as ice covered the roads and power lines and trees continued to fall.
“This past weekend was a real-world event where we were able to use our skills and actually use it for the real-world event.”
The club has eight skilled members, each with expertise in different fields like meteorology, communications and emergency management, among others. Rodriguez is one of them, and he said he's hopeful this club can continue to grow.
“We’ve had a lot of amateur radio operators come in and give us snowfall and ice reports, traffic reports. We even had to do a welfare check for somebody because the AT&T outage affected the communication, so we had to make a phone call with that. So many of the things we do here with amateur radio is situational awareness of what’s going on in our community, whether it be snowfall reports, whether or not it could be any type of disaster.”
They said they want counties to build their own amateur radio capabilities to communicate with operators across the state. Because Rodriguez said, if all else fails, amateur radio works.
“For example, it could be, ‘Hey, I have a flat tyre,’ to, ‘Wow, there are significant power outages,’ we should inform the state so that way if a shelter was needed for that person, we could be able to assist them in their resources, whatever they may need”
