Amateur radio station to help Ky. disaster relief
By Robert Reeves
Kentucky Baptist Convention
Louisville—When the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, the loss of cell phone antennas on the top of the buildings caused sudden communications disruptions for millions of people.
Last year, similar phone outages occurred all along the Gulf Coast as both cell towers and landlines were impacted by the high winds and floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.
Kentucky Baptists’ disaster relief efforts now have taken a big step forward in being able to deal with such disruptions with the addition of a new amateur radio base station to help improve communications with volunteers working in devastated areas.
The new station—K4KBC—went online at the Kentucky Baptist Building last week after the erection of a 30-foot radio antenna that will allow for worldwide communications.
The new station, paid for with donations to Kentucky Baptist disaster relief, will be a tremendous help in coordinating disaster relief units that might be many miles from each other, as they were after the Gulf Coast hurricanes last year, according to Larry Koch, director of Kentucky Baptist disaster relief.
“This puts us in a whole new arena of communications capability,” Koch said, adding that Kentucky Baptist disaster relief now also is recruiting licensed volunteers to serve as operators for additional mobile communications units.
In addition to the KBC-owned base station and mobile communications trailer, a number of individually owned stations can deploy to disaster locations, Koch added.
Kentucky Baptist disaster relief has long used amateur radio as one of its communications options. Kentucky’s mobile communications unit served as the official amateur radio station for the North American Mission Board’s disaster relief command center in Mississippi in the aftermath of Katrina.
The difference being made with the addition of the Louisville base station, however, is that Koch now has an additional way to communicate directly with the Baptist building in Louisville. That office handles the call out and assignment of volunteer units during a disaster response.
Coordination of teams and the arrival of volunteers were especially difficult after Katrina last year due to the massive scale of the disaster, the large volunteer response and the unreliability of telephone service.
“We needed to be able to pass on such information as where we were located, information about roads, gas availability, equipment needs, etc., and it was very difficult at times,” Koch recalled.
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KEEPING IN TOUCH Leon Priest, a disaster relief volunteer from Stithton Baptist Church, works a radio last year in Jackson, Miss. Kentucky Baptist disaster relief’s communications team served as the communications station for the North American Mission Board in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. (KBC file photo)
PLANTING ANTENNA Tom Westerfield (left), a disaster relief volunteer from First Baptist Church of Hopkinsville, and Larry Koch, director of Kentucky Baptist disaster relief, install an antenna outside the Baptist building in Louisville. A new amateur radio station will help coordinate disaster relief work around the country where phone lines and cell towers have been disabled. (KBC photo by Robert Reeves)
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Coupled with the creation of a new team of disaster relief volunteers who have been trained to staff a disaster relief command center at the Baptist building, Koch expects coordination of future large responses to be smoother because the base station will allow for direct communication to the Baptist building, regardless of the condition of other communications infrastructure.
More help needed
Tom Westerfield, a disaster relief volunteer who has been involved in amateur radio since 1964, said 35 Kentucky volunteers currently are licensed by the FCC and can staff the Baptist building station or a station in the field.
But many more are needed, he said, especially from the Louisville area.
“We’d like to have 150 (statewide),” in order to man the various stations and be able to rotate volunteers during long disaster responses such as that caused by last year’s hurricanes, he said.
Westerfield said amateur radio has been an important lifeline during times of disaster through the years in relaying vital messages between individuals and groups.
“The priority of other communications systems has to be for government and public service agencies,” Westerfield said. “But amateur radio is much more accessible because its priority is public service.”
Westerfield said the technology of amateur radio has advanced in recent years to make it even more useful. In addition to being able to transmit a simple Morse code message at times when bandwidth is so low that a voice can’t be heard, amateur radio now can transmit e-mail and other documents to and from the Internet.
For more information about Kentucky Baptist disaster relief or the new amateur radio station, contact the KBC men on mission department at (866) 489-3527.
Western Recorder issue date: September 19, 2006
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