{"id":482,"date":"2011-05-28T07:50:10","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T12:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ohd3ares.org\/?p=482"},"modified":"2011-05-28T07:50:10","modified_gmt":"2011-05-28T12:50:10","slug":"fema-amateur-radio-the-last-line-of-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/?p=482","title":{"rendered":"FEMA: Amateur Radio \u201cThe Last Line of Defense\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.arrl.org\/news\/view\/fema-administrator-calls-amateur-radio-the-last-line-of-defense\">From The ARRL Website:<\/a><\/p>\n<h2>FEMA Administrator Calls Amateur Radio \u201cThe Last Line of Defense\u201d<\/h2>\n<p>05\/25\/2011<\/p>\n<p>In an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bzx-kvo1i_Y\"><strong>FCC forum<\/strong><\/a> on earthquake communications preparedness, Federal Emergency Management Agency (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fema.gov\/\"><strong>FEMA<\/strong><\/a>)  Administrator Craig Fugate described the Amateur Radio operator as \u201cthe  ultimate backup, the originators of what we call social media.\u201d The  forum&#8211; held May 3 at FCC Headquarters in Washington, DC &#8212; brought  together officials from the White House, the Department of Homeland  Security (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.dhs.gov\/index.shtm\"><strong>DHS<\/strong><\/a>), the United States Geological Survey (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usgs.gov\/\"><strong>USGS<\/strong><\/a>),  FEMA, the FCC and the private sector. Fugate and FCC Bureau of Public  Safety and Homeland Security Chief Jamie Barnett gave the opening  remarks.<\/p>\n<p>Later in the forum, Fugate spoke more on Amateur Radio. \u201cDuring the  initial communications out of Haiti, volunteers using assigned  frequencies that they are allocated, their own equipment, their own  money, nobody pays them, were the first ones oftentimes getting word out  in the critical first hours and first days as the rest of the systems  came back up,\u201d he told the forum. \u201cI think that there is a tendency  because we have done so much to build infrastructure and resiliency in  all our other systems, we have tended to dismiss that role \u2018When  Everything Else Fails.\u2019 Amateur Radio oftentimes is our last line of  defense.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Fugate said that he thinks \u201cwe get so sophisticated and we have  gotten so used to the reliability and resilience in our wireless and  wired and our broadcast industry and all of our public safety  communications, that we can never fathom that they\u2019ll fail. They do.  They have. They will. I think a strong Amateur Radio community [needs to  be] plugged into these plans. Yes, most of the time they\u2019re going be  bored, because a lot of the time, there\u2019s not a lot they\u2019re going to be  doing that other people aren\u2019t doing with Twitter and Facebook and  everything else. But when you need Amateur Radio, you really need them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>You can watch a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bzx-kvo1i_Y\"><strong>video of the forum<\/strong><\/a> on YouTube. Fugate\u2019s remarks begin at 18:55.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From The ARRL Website: FEMA Administrator Calls Amateur Radio \u201cThe Last Line of Defense\u201d 05\/25\/2011 In an FCC forum on earthquake communications preparedness, Federal Emergency Management&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arrl","category-general"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-23 02:50:16","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohd3ares.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}