Salt Lake County ARES

It’s time again for the monthly meeting of Salt Lake County ARES®, tomorrow (Wednesday) evening at 1900 MT at the Intermountain Health Employee Services Center, 5245 College Drive in Murray. Parking is free and plentiful.

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

On the agenda:

Salt Lake County is in the middle of a three-day exercise called the “Continuity Cup.” The scenario involves a brush fire in the south end of the county which gets out of control, and spreads rapidly to become a conflagration involving mass evacuations. Salt Lake County ARES® does not have a structured role, but we’re conducting a brief, parallel exercise Thursday morning.

We’ve arranged to originate simulated hospital facility status reports via Winlink from three Intermountain facilities, receive them at the SLCo ECC, print and deliver them to the county health department at the ESF-8 desk. The reports, in HICS 251 format, will be sent by Vern, K7VMR (Primary Children’s Hospital,) Dan, N7XDL (Supply Chain Center,) and me (LDS Hospital) just as the county’s exercise gets underway about 1000 MT.

The intent is to let county agencies see that we can deliver essential traffic while saving, not adding, workload to ECC staffers.

At our meeting Wednesday evening, I’ll show you some of the extensive materials prepared by the county for this exercise. The formal incident action plan in ICS format will give you insight into how these forms you keep hearing about are used by the pros. I’ll also have a slide deck used by trainers for the drill, and even some fake TV news reports the county created with the help of AI to serve as situational awareness inputs for participants.

The Weekly SLCo ARES® Net is about to get busier. David Nelson, W1UTE has agreed to serve as net manager, and we’d like to get an idea of how many additional members would like turns at helping run the net. The net script has been simplified, and running net control is great practice for both ITU phonetics and learning to think quickly, all in a judgment-free zone. If you’d like to be involved, make it known at the meeting.Mark your calendars for the Salt Lake County ARES® annual holiday dinner, on Wednesday, December 9th at 6:30pm. We have reserved a private room at Golden Corral Buffet and Grill, 665 East Fort Union Blvd. in Midvale. They’ve been told to expect 45, but the room can accommodate up to 65 people.

We won’t hold our normal monthly meetings in November or December, so the dinner will be our last opportunity to get together this year. (We will not hold our weekly net that evening.) Again, that’s Wednesday, December 9th at 6:30pm at Golden Corral, 665 East Fort Union Blvd. in Midvale.

See you at the meeting!