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Emergencies come in all shapes and sizes. The most likely to cause extensive communications outages (or overloads) is the katrina / rita type hurricane which often takes out the communications infrastructure rather than temporarily shuts it down. However, with that serious a wide spread damage area, local amateurs are more likely to be victims (or even casualties) with less ability to participate than even in normal exercise times. This can also apply to other disaster types as well.
Since amateur radio is quite adept at point to point comm, the only infrastructure absolutely necessary which is vulnerable is antennas. While repeaters are very nice and it's possible to have backup generators that can keep them running for days (although the requirement could be for weeks), they don't do much good if the tower is laying on the ground or the heliax severed near the top. Also, even though some places maintain more amateur repeaters than tend to be used on a regular basis, they can become a rare commodity in short supply during an emergency.
All this said, it would seem that a primary function of local amateurs would be not only to train and maintain equipment but also to stockpile parts and materials for making emergency repairs - such as temporary antennas. Included in this should be cateloging information and plans so that amateurs from outside can come in to help. It's important that the equipment and operational procedures be useable by people who have never been to the area before.
Those coming in from outside are a primary reason that formal large area (or national) certification is important.
Training goes both ways also. One needs to be not only familar with the equipment and area but also with the people involved in the served agencies (and local gov.). Also, these people need to become familar with you and the other regular amateurs and with what you can do for them.
In a communications emergency, communications is the scarce commodity that becomes most important. Becoming a janitor sweeping the floor or a typist entering in memos into a computer are not likely to enhance communications. The same thing goes for becoming a paramedic. Those who know how to communicate and how to use the communications equipment which is still working must concentrate on the primary job and not get sidetracked. It seems to be human nature that when one sees someone else performing competently and appearing to know what they are doing, that one assume they can do even more and different things in the same fashion. That means one tends to assume the guys that know what they're doing actually know all about everything in an emergency. This can quickly become a diversion of your scarce comm skills away from the primary task of communicating.
I recently participated in a two day state mandated regional WMD exercise on interoperability. The official amateur radio involvement was only for a couple of hours late on the first day but some of us were present for the whole exercise and did some operating during the entire time, mostly with hf winlink. There was even a 1 day table top rehersal a month prior warning the participants of what was going to be happening. Suffice to say the amateurs heeded it and prepared for it while others did not and the results showed so later. There were many lessons 'learned' in that exercise, at least for some, hopefully for most.
One of the first lessons was that the officials that knew what they were doing were not necessarily the ones in charge and the ones in charge didn't necesssarily know what they were doing. It seems that even near the coast here in hurricane land that many officials have gone through their careers considering emergency training to be diversions to be avoided, leaving it to others. It will be noted that the night of day 1 was a city council meeting (which I did not attend) and that something serious happened there as day 1 and day 2 were radically different right down to who was placed in charge and the difference was all for the better. Note though that this was in the overall management of the disaster exercise and not related to amateur radio other than being under that management.
One of the amateur radio successes/failures was due to a total lack of information coming back to the EOC from the incident command site, two of our people were dispatched there to provide some eyes and ears on the ground and to report back to us. This was with the knowledge, desire and approval of the leadership. The information reported back didn't include anything official from the incident command people of the exercise, however, it evidently precipitated some of the events that took place at the city council meeting that night as it helped determine why there was no official information stream coming from incident command to the EOC.
Another observation was the importance of winlink 2000 as a tool. For complex and precise information, it offered the prospects of a significant improvement over voice messages for information flow rate. Since we currently only have HF winlink as there are no digipeaters or significant winlink vhf stations in range, we also discovered the need for establishing something as the vhf winlink is many times faster and tends to be much more reliable propagation wise. Also, with a MACC located 50 miles away and the prospect of a large scale fast pace emergency event, having a much shorter turn around time on winlink access can be important.
We handled official traffic via hf winlink, vhf voice and hf voice. The amount of traffic required was compounded by a variety of problems, requiring several back and forth cycles in some cases - potentially clogging the comm pathways. In some cases, it was the inexperience of the non amateur radio operator - like another served agency volunteer untrained in communications. In others, it was the experienced but overworked and distracted leadership trying to do too much with too little.
We've been fortunate here in that the EM has been very supportive of amateur radio and has continued the decades long tradition of heavy amateur radio involvement in emergencies in this area. Partly, it's a matter of economics as this area couldn't support a paid staff full time. The EM has not only permitted amateur radio operators access to training, but has encouraged it. As such, I've attended about 7 classes on hazmat, ICS and radiological topics in the last 3 years, as well as several level 1 and level 2 skywarn classes and other topics.
It's important to gain a working knowledge of the structure and details of emergency operations because the messages that must be originated cannot just be sent effectively as typically provided. This was a prime lesson from the exercise. Those originating the messages are not communicators and are not able to concentrate on communicating as they are busy, stressed out and tired. They may create partial answers to important outside queries or be providing requests or status reports on conditions. And, in short, their messages are not in message handling format and it's likely they may not even make sense to anyone receiving them.
While it's extremely important that traffic handling of messages must be done without modification or error, it is just as important that one must originate the message accurately. That means the message must be complete and make sense to someone other than the originator. It also means that amateur originating the formal message must take what ever is provided and convert it to a comprehendable, clear message. That is aided by extensive training - perhaps even by wearing the scba and teletubby suit for hazmat. It is also just as important to dot the i's and cross the t's and get the message reviewed and approved (AND SIGNED) by the originator - so as to be absolutely sure it's what the originator intended. Failure to do this can result in multiple iterations of communications tying up the comm channel, comm personnel and distracting the originator and recipient multiple times as one tries to convey what was intended several times and delaying completion of the comm message substantially.
This is not to be construed whatsoever as second guessing what the originator should be doing but rather attempting to discern what the originator is attempting to accomplish with the message and then verifying that how you formalized it was what the originator intended. This is also something that cannot be done after the formal message has been sent from the originating station.
Remember, communications is about conveying information and getting it through the noise. It is a skill unto itself and doing it done over radio (or other electronic means) is a skill even fewer have developed. Like playing the violin, it's also one that requires constant practice. It's going to be one in short supply in any emergency, regardless of the availability of communications equipment.
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