This NOAA satellite image taken on Sept. 4, 2007 shows Hurricane Felix over Honduras and Nicaragua

IRESC assists during Hurricane Felix

At 0800 UTC on Tuesday 4th September 2007, as Category 5 Hurricane Felix bore down on the North Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, radio amateur emergency communicators initiated their emergency plans.

The Hurricane Watch and VoIP Hurricane Nets activated to supply the USA’s National Hurricane Centre with status reports from the affected zones. These reports, from volunteer communicators to the professionals, have proved time and time again to be an essential adjunct to overloaded and often damaged official links.

IRESC is a global group that connects conventional amateur radio links to the Internet using VoIP for speech and live incident databases for messaging and background information. The facility is intended to provide live links between the disaster zone and the agencies that can help or require direct communication, even if they are half a world apart.

In the build-up to Felix making landfall, IRESC and the Hurricane Net agreed to link their two VoIP Echolink servers together as part of an ongoing collaborative effort. IRESC worked primarily with Rob Macedo, KD1CY, Director of Operations, VoIP Hurricane Net.

The Hurricane Watch Net was established on 14.325 MHz, along with 14.300 MHz for the Caribbean and 7.090 MHz for Honduras, to gather HF reports from the region. The VoIP Net was connected to WX4NHC, the Echolink node located directly within the National Hurricane Centre premises at Florida International University, Miami, Florida.
Reports were soon flowing in. Then, a call for help was received. Being the local language of the affected area, a lot of information was being received in Spanish. The information was vital but needed translating.

Fortunately, IRESC was on hand to assist. Being a truly international organisation, IRESC has different language sections and the Spanish section is one of the largest!

IRESC External Affairs Officer, Steve Richards G4HPE, was monitoring activity and heard the request for translators. Within a few moments, he had summoned IRESC’s Spanish Liaison Officer Andoni Axpe Soto, EB1FGO.

Andoni was requested to translate some of the hurricane data coming from the Nicaraguan Sistema Nacional para la Prevención, Mitigación y Atención de Desastres.
A number of Nicaraguan and Honduran broadcasters were streaming their output to the web. Several were able to stay on-air as the Hurricane hit. EB1FGO was also requested to monitor as many of these stations as possible and translate the live reports they were continually carrying.

The translations were provided to Steve G4HPE directly through the IRESC secure internal systems. Steve then packaged these and provided them over Echolink, with email back-up, to the VoIP Hurricane Net.

G4HPE and EB1FGO continued to provide this service right up until the net was stood down at 0001 UTC on Wednesday 5th September.

Many significant pieces of information were relayed during the operation. For example, at one point the President of Honduras, Señor Manuel Zelaya Rosales, was heard on the Voice of Honduras radio station praising “the community of radio hams for the aid."

General details of the scale of damage and casualties were relayed within minutes of their confirmation on Nicaraguan TV. IRESC also carried the news that the President of Nicaragua, Señor José Daniel Ortega Saavedra, had declared the north Atlantic region of his country to be a disaster zone and was requesting international aid.

Without doubt, the valuable role of the radio amateur in freely providing their services to enhance the official channels has been proven again. The geographical spread of the operators and diversity of technologies that amateurs offer is a powerful and resilient tool in disaster mitigation.

The importance of our service is recognised by many authorities around the world and is something of which we should be justly proud.

http://www.iresc.org/