Editor’s Comments

Something that will be happening sometime in the near future will be the requirement that any emcomm volunteer must have the basic ICS training.  This is not hard to obtain, as is evident in the President’s column below.  Paul caught a combined ICS 100/700 course at DEMA recently.  Sitting through the classroom version gives you the opportunity to ask questions, interact with other students, and possibly gain some new ideas.  Every class I sat through was rewarding as I did pick up something I hadn’t thought of before.  

In the President’s column and the club news section you will find links to the training calendar at DEMA.  Courses there are free to amateur radio operators that will be, or might be, involved in emergency or public service communications.  Since that is one of the reasons we have a license in the first place, that pretty much covers all of the licensed amateurs everywhere.  Work on getting the “basic four”, ICS 100, ICS 200, ICS 700 and ICS 800.  You just might find some information that will be useful and helpful to you, and besides if you attend the person class you rub elbows with some of the people who will be in charge when the manure hits the ventilating system.

Talking about the ventilating system, public service events are a great way to practice skills that will be needed if we are called to assist the Counties.  Practice is obtained using your radio, probably your HT which probably isn’t used that often normally, in a net situation.  How many of you regularly check into nets?  And how many of those are different modes?  There are VHF, DMR, SSB, digital, and CW nets on every week.  Checking into more than one type gives you a different “view” of the procedures in each of those different nets.

A little history that might be of interest to someone.  In the AUXCOMM column you will see a reference to a CERT team starting in Bay City, which is on Long Neck on the Rehoboth Bay.  Bay City is a nice mobile home park which was started pretty much in 1955.  At that time (when I was 4) my Mom and Dad were looking for a place near the water for vacations, and came upon the location.  Dad and Paul Bahn (who I called Uncle Paul) obtained a lease from Mr. Hitchens for 20 years for lots near the water.  The only places there at the time were two “hunting cabins”, as duck and goose hunting was great in the area.  The rest of the place was a farm.  Dad obtained permission to dig a “lagoon” and the drudge that was used stuck a pine tree on the way in.  It was a “Bay City” drudge, and the sign fell off.  Dad found it and nailed it to the pine tree, and Bay City was named.  

When the original lease expired, long after Dad’s death, the rent went from $45.00 per year to $400.00, and after Mom died, I could not afford the price of the yearly lease, now near $1000.00 when back then the minimum wage was less than $2.00 per hour, and I sold the cottage Dad and Mom had built.  The cottage is now gone, the lot we first had was empty the last time I looked, while working for Verizon, but there will be memories of many summers where I learned how to swim and where I first went deer and squirrel hunting.  Great times!

For about eight years there were only six cottages and the two hunting cabins in Bay City, but soon more and more people found the place and it grew and grew and became what it is now.  The places that once had a big deer population now have houses and where I killed my second deer is a street.  But one thing I do remember is the “Storm of ’62” where we lost the first trailer we put there to the flood, and many others lost their trailers and cottages also.  For Bay City, and other of the mobile home parks in the area, change is another “Storm of “62” of that intensity to occur.  

Having a CERT team at the mobile home park, with maybe AUXCOMM assistance, might just be able to provide help to those that might be affected by another such occurrence.