Amber Willard
NORTHEAST GLENDALE -- Members of the Glendale Emergency Amateur Radio
Service sigh and shake their heads when people take for granted that
their telephones and cellular phones work.
"In a disaster, amateur radio operators are the first ones to be able
to get communication out," said Don Hanson, one of GEARS' officers.
That's what the city is counting on, said Fire Capt. Jeff Muis, the
city's emergency services coordinator. If the city were to lose its lines
of communication following an earthquake or other disaster, the GEARS
group will provide its backup.
The group is in the process of combining its radio equipment from two
rooms in the basement of City Hall to one high-tech room -- without
interrupting the members' ability to serve the city.
"Few cities have dedicated emergency operation centers, so we're
really lucky," said Jim Olliff, another GEARS officer, of the City Hall
basement. The basement is set up to accommodate almost every city
department in an emergency.
The new room, when it is completed in about a month, will have
carpet-lined walls for better acoustics, seven stations for operators to
scan different frequencies and send out messages, when possible, via
laptop computers. At a work "party" last week, GEARS members rerouted
their radio cables into the room.
"With all that stuff back there, we can talk around the world," Hanson
said.
Most recently, the group set up a communication network for Glendale
Memorial Medical Center when an underground cable was damaged, cutting
off its telephone, fax and computer lines. In two hours, the amateur
radio operators enabled doctors and nurses to communicate within the
hospital and rerouted telephones to another site.
