Rensselaer County

RACES

Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service

Tom Stewart - Chief Radio Officer

RACES and the Chicken Little Project

or the Y2K Date Change Over in Rensselaer County

By David R. Kinerson, WB2VXS

This pages were written shortly after the Y2K date change over with the intent of sharing my personal adventures with several friends during New Years Eve.  It is included here as documentation of the RACES contrubution of the Y2K event.  It really should be rewritten with RACES at the center of the story, rather than WB2VXS.  But, I had it on hand,  and in HTML format to boot, so I decided to include it.

Most of you know that I am an amateur radio operator (ham). The Chicken Little project was the code name used for the Y2K readiness response by Rensselaer County Emergency Services. My interest in radios became a key part of that response over the New Years eve weekend.

I had called the Rensselaer County Emergency Services in November inquiring about whether or not amateur radio was to be part of the county's response for Y2K. Most counties in NY have a formal arraignment with the local amateur radio population called the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES). Rensselaer County had an excellent RACES group but it had fallen by the wayside in recent years.  I was just curious as to whether or not there would be an attempt to activate RACES as backup communications for the Y2K event.

After a long discussion with Emergency Services, I stepped forward and volunteered to assemble a group of hams for the event. I was confident that I could find 10 to 12 guys for the event. Boy was I wrong! It seems most hams work in areas that involve computers of some sort. Most people that I talked to were on standby or had to be at work over New Years eve. By December 30, I had found 4 people, including myself and my wife, Bill, NY2U and the RACES chief radio officer George.

I managed to convince  Bill to "talk up" (advertise) the event during the month of December on the local repeaters and got the Radio Officer to agree to man the Emergency Operations Center (EOC).  George and I went down to the EOC and set up and tested a radio about a week before the event. All went well.

The EOC would contain VIPs from the various County Agencies, representatives from the 2 power companies in the county and the State Police, and of course a RACES operator. All told, about 30 people were expected to be there.

On the night of the event I got a call from George that his wife had injured her back and he was needed to take care of their new baby. This left me to man the EOC. I did get the R.O. to agree to monitor the evenings activities by radio, however.

So wifie and I went down to the EOC at 6 PM 12/31/99 and fired up the radio. I brought with me a number of other radios so I could monitor several repeaters at the same time. That way I could get a better picture of what was happening in the region, as other counties also had hams participating as backup communicators.

At about 7 PM I heard the Red Cross of Albany looking for another operator for it's facility in Troy. Now Troy is where the Rensselaer County EOC is located. So I "volunteered" my wife, as she is also a ham. Besides she looked kinda bored to me. I took one of the spare radios and ran her up to the Troy Red Cross in Lansingburgh. We set up the radio, left her there with an ample supply of yarn and knitting needles, and returned to the EOC at about 8 PM.

In the mean time, Bill, had started a "net" which was attracting a number of hams in the local area. His "spreading-the-word" had really generated some interest! When the EOC was formerly activated at 10 PM, Bill had 22 check ins, with 19 hams available for dispatch to any part of the county.

As the event progressed, I established communications, either directly or thru another ham, with the State EOC, and the Albany, Schenectady, Greene, Columbia, Schohairie, Fulton and Montgomery County EOCs. We also had direct communications with the American Red Cross and the local hospitals as well. I fielded the usual requests for information such as emergency phone numbers and status, impressing the Emergency Services Director in the process.

At about 11:30 the EOC got word that a key piece of communications equipment in one of the local towns in the county was not Y2K compliant. The hams were requested to identify someone to go to that location and provide communications back to the EOC. I paced a call out to Bill's net and he promptly identified a ham who was diving in that direction. Ten minutes later Bill called again and provided the names and calls of 3 other hams who either lived at or near the location and who could be in place in 10 minutes time if so needed. Now the Emergency Services Director was really impressed!

All 4 of the respondents were placed on standby. One of the problems with the town involved was the need for a relay station between the town and the EOC. Here the George was able to help by virtue of the fact that he could hear both the EOC and the location in question and could relay messages as needed.

The clock marched on. As the evening progressed, the noise in the room got louder and louder. CNN was playing on one large screen TV and Channel 10 News was playing on another. Once in a while someone would change channels to see what the other networks were saying. Just as the clock rolled over to the next century, some wag turned the lights off, another yelled "It's Y2K" as a third flashed around a large multicell flashlight. We all laughed. The Emergency Services Director passed around glasses of sparkling cider and we all toasted in the New Year. Hams all over the capital district were passing "Happy New Year" messages to each other over the air, among them, Wifie up at the Red Cross.

A telephone operator from the 911 center came in at about 00:15 AM and advised that the equipment in question was working well enough to provide coverage in the afore mentioned location, so I called Bill on the radio and had him release the operators on standby. Bill said that we had over 50 people check in during the evening's activities. Most impressive, considering that we never got started on the project until 6 weeks before it was to happen.

At about 00:45 AM I got a call from Wifie, asking if I could run up to Lansingburgh and pick her up, as her work was now done. So up and back I went, recovering a very tired Wifie, 2 new mittens and a radio in the process.

At about 1:15 AM the Albany County RACES net closed and our EOC closed up at about 1:30 AM. Wifie and I packed up the radios, antennas and cables, and managed to make it home at about 2:10 AM. that night. As I drifted off to sleep in my nice warm bed, I felt very satisfied that we, the hams in the area and Bill, in particular, had done an outstanding job in providing backup communications. Had we been required to dispatch hams to the troubled community, we would have been there for as long as it took to implement a repair, whether it took a day, a week or a month. Such is the work of unsung heroes.

So what did you do over the New Years holiday?

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