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2024-06-17T19:42:41+0000

Emergency managers have a lot on their plate during an emergency incident. They need to understand the extent and nature of the emergency, figure out what assets can be brought to bear, plan to achieve goals in responding to the emergency and effective operations according to the plan to resolve the emergency.

These professionals will first call upon local and mutual aid resources - people they know and trust. When it becomes clear that intrinsic and mutual aid resources will be inadequate to address the sudden problem, additonal resources must be called in - contractors, specialized teams, federal, state and NGO teams. The National Incident Management System (NIMS) is a nationwide standardized system to establish the capabilities of a resource that might be called in from across the state, or even nationally. NIMS assures an incident team to know the capabilities, equipment, training level and strength of these extended resources, whether or not they personally know them.

Individual radio amateurs with their personal radios are not included in NIMS, so for the incident staff, their appearance is more a distracton than an asset. Even amateur clubs have problems in planning for emergency deployment, as all available members will "show up" without being mobilized, providing no reserve force to cover extended incidents. They often arrive without proper safety equipment, seasonal clothing. Individual radio operators arrive without the resources to be effective for more than a single day duty, so the position that they may be assigned would become unfilled when they need relief.
Individual amateur radios are not integrated into the incident communications system. Even with a club response, they may depend on a repeater or other infrastructure that may not be effective or available in the emergency.

In summary, radio amateurs are seldom used to good advantage in emergencies, not because they can not be, but because there is no structure to support their training, utilization and organization to build functional teams.

2024-06-22T02:56:14+0000

Communications Volunteer Institute Home

Communications Volunteer Institute is a program to empower volunteers to be reliable, effective assets supporting incident communications in emergencies, disasters and large public events. There are about 750,000 licensed radio amateurs in the USA, and about 125,000 licensed General Mobile Radio Service operators. This is a vast pool of potential volunteers with interest, skills and experience in radio and other technologies.

The world has changed with many more and different emergency challenges than before - weather; earthquakes; avananches; mudslides; sinkholes; industrial and transportation sabotage and accidents with hazardous releases and disruption of movement of goods and services; wildfires, mudslides, drought, and flood; terrorist incidents with mass shootings and bombings. Each of these bring unique needs for communications that span far beyond the capabilities of day-to-day public safety and commercial services. These events also often disrupt those communications services.

This site is intended to gather together the various stakeholders to craft a system for volunteers to meet the sudden needs of major emergencies.

2025-01-04T21:33:20+0000