Salt Lake County ARES

Tonight is our August monthly meeting of Salt Lake County ARES. We’ll gather at 1900 MT at the Intermountain Health Employee Services Center, 5245 College Drive in Murray. (Google directions at this link.) We’ll try to have doors open at 1830. Parking is free and plentiful, and TRAX and UTA buses stop near the building.

For those who can’t make it in person, find the MicroSoft Teams meeting at this link.

Something I have not been doing well as EC is formally tracking the training, meeting attendance and service hours of SLCO ARES members. Those stats are important to ARRL in making our case nationally, and there will be times they bolster our pitch to prospective local partners as well. Therefore, look for a clipboard to be passed your way during the meeting tonight; find your callsign and initial in the box next to it. (Don’t just check-mark it, initial it!) We’ll have someone checking the MS Teams gallery to credit virtual attendees.

Our main topic tonight will be a report on the just-completed pilot program for unaccompanied, badged access for ten of our members to activate radios from Intermountain Health hospitals, including successes and remaining challenges.

We’ll also get our first in-depth look at the steps required of hospital staff when they set up their command centers. This information will allow us to develop very specific training which will allow ARES members to “hit the ground running” when we arrive to support our partners in an emergency. It will also give us practice in preparing meaningful plans for future partners.

We have only three in-person meetings left this year. Don’t miss this one! See you tonight at 1900.