You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 174 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
I hear it through the grapevine
Reaction Guidelines for Communications
This is a resource for communications. The goal is to have procedures you can pick up off the shelf and start putting in place when it’s too late to avoid disaster.
Glossary of terms used
Auxiliary Communication Service (ACS) and ACS Radio Nets
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Amateur radio operators who train to facilitate first responder communications during a disaster, usually NERTs, associated with SFFD
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cell towers
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Transmitter/ receiver transceivers, digital signal processors, control electronics, GPS receivers, and antenna, usually on a tower, with primary and backup electrical power sources
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NERTs
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Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams — volunteer first responders who work under the direction of the SFFD
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Outdoor Public Warning System (OPWS)
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The broadcast and siren system that can be heard all over the city when in operation
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Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA)
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This is the system that sends notifications to personal phones, usually about weather events and Amber alerts
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Communication is vital in trying to survive and manage a disaster
Sending the appropriate supplies and the correct type and number of responders, and the ability to triage to best use your resources all depends on knowing what is going on where.
San Francisco has emergency communication systems
San Francisco’s communication options in a disaster include the ACS Radio Nets, the Emergency Alert System, the OPWS, cellphones (WEA texts), and sending information via bike or walking messenger.
SF’s emergency communication systems are very limited
- The ACS Radio Net people are all volunteer and limited both in number and equipment. Assuming they all survive in an emergency and can travel to where they are needed, there are still just over 1 radio operator per city fire battalion. Because the ACS Radio Net people are not geographically evenly distributed over the city, in combination with the likelihood of major travel obstacles, not every fire battalion will have a radio. This means large areas of the city will lack information on what is happening, and where.
- The OPWS is offline.
- Cellphone towers have limited total power supplies, usually good for up to 2 days.
Don’t underestimate the scale of likely catastrophe
The ACS Radio Nets can fail due to insufficient personnel, equipment, and location.
Without electricity, the Emergency Alert System fails.
When cellphone towers run out of energy, texting options fail.
The Hanshin earthquake made walking or biking into Kobe from less damaged parts of the region almost impossible for over 3 days. Current climate change disasters in Pakistan, Tennessee, and Mississippi were/are not navigable by walking or bike or even by boat in many cases. So walking/biking cannot be depended on.
And we know things will get worse.
There are a few easy ways to improve the systems we have
- Solar panels on every cellphone tower would increase the ability of the system to run in an emergency.
- Get OPWS back online.
- Increase money for training and resources, such as radios, for NERTs.
The systems SF has are not sufficient
1000 year events are now yearly events. We need to build for the worst in order to survive it.
I’ll hope that someone gets my message in a bottle
We need robust, not fragile. What we’ve got right now is very fragile.