Hams: Are We REALLY Emergency Providers?

Over the past few days, I've been impressed with the very positive relations many hams in the US have with emergency services.  There's little doubt that, unlike the UK, the authorities in many states of the US do actually take hams seriously and see them as a potential resource, almost entirely independent of the complex infrastructure that can, as has so often been proved, fail quite spectacularly.

In the US, ham emergency comms is valued more highly than in the UK, where it is mostly now treated as a joke.

Since the introduction of the latest Civil Contingencies Act, and drawing on my own correspondence, there's little doubt that hams in the UK have been relegated to 'no longer needed' status.  Reasons cited to me are various, but include: the law doesn't require amateurs to be involved any more; everybody has a mobile phone in their pocket now; there are fewer hams than there used to be, etc.

Try managing a civil emergency when there's no network.

So, bleating on, as hams are apt to do when their hobby is threatened in any way, that we provide an essential service, seems destined only to fall on utterly deaf ears from now on.  Raynet has done sterling work, but, like most of the hamming scene, is seeing many ops dropping off the old age end of life, to see no newcomers take their place. 

What is really unfortunate is the failure of local authorities to see how multi-layered and complex the provision of mobile phone signals actually is.  They seem oblivious to the wide-scale failure of networks in large metropolises like London and New York, sometimes as a result of weather, sometimes being down to just technological breakdown. 

In a very real sense, local authorities, at least in the UK, appear to have put all their trust in the expectation of a mobile phone system that, as they see it, will never fail.  That, and the typically-British tendency to believe that, somehow, despite all the scaremongering about terrorism, those mass civil emergencies won't really ever happen.

Well, we'll see how things pan out. When the weather went Arctic the last few years here in the UK, it was independently-minded and resourced folk with their own 4x4s that kept essential health staff coming to work and rescuing stranded individuals.  It wasn't uncommon to see police and council vehicles on their sides whilst Joe Public carried on past them.  There's little reason to see why, when mass public comms systems fail in future, hams would not, in fact, have a similarly effective and immediate solution to offer. 

But we, as a hobby, do need to realise hamming is no longer perceived to be of any real value in the UK's preparations for emergencies and disasters.  If we don't, we run the real risk of sounding desperately out of touch with political reality.  A real educational push is required, and soon.