ARES Emergency Coordinators for several NNY Counties worked together over the past 5 months to plan and implement a section-level Simulated Emergency Test. Practices were held in July, August, and September.
The actual SET activity is taking place during the first week of October. The SET scenario is that some event has caused a situation where regular communications have been disrupted and a Request for Information (RI) has been received by the Section Emergency Coordinator (SEC). Consequently, the SEC has sent the RI (including instructions on how to respond) out to all the county Emergency Coordinators.
Information is collected from members and consolidated into a single response which is sent back to the SEC. In a real situation, the county reports would be correlated and the data sent back to the requesting agency in one message.
Communication between the SEC and ECs is by Winlink radio email. This allows precise message transmission without errors and without requiring real-time scheduling.
A late addition to the SET was receiving and acknowledging a message from the Department of Defense. This message from Northcom (Northern Command) was delivered to NNY ARES groups via the Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS).
If you have not had the opportunity to participate in the SET activity in your county but would like to do so, please contact your county Emergency Coordinator. If you are in a county that currently does not have an active EC or ARES program, you can contact me directly.