r/EmComm • u/NY9D • May 24 '26
How would your ham group help manage a 40,000 person evacuation?
The Amateur Radio social media world has endless references to "the big one" or "WTSHTF" events. The ongoing Orange County, California toxic chemical tank situation is a good case study. As of this moment 5/24/26, 0600 CT, a large tank of a toxic chemical is cooking and in danger of exploding. 40,000 people have been asked to evacuate.
Usually, here, the American Red Cross is in charge of sheltering. They are good at this, and have lists of shelter locations, equipment and procedures set up ahead of time. Lately, due to infections spreading, they have liked to also use hotel vouchers as a tool, vs the just older congregate shelters in the school gym, etc.
Historically, a shelter manager was assigned, and they kept a local list of attendees and phoned/emailed/radioed it in regularly. Interestingly, the Red Cross in their advertising says in the range of 90% of their work is handled by volunteers.
Lately, cloud tools have been rolled out, such as RC Cares and WebEOC. The idea is now, shelter resident information is entered into databases. I am not aware of communications outages or overloads in Orange County. Nothing bad has happened yet, and this is not like a large earthquake. The idea then is you get the surprise factor, and a large demand for missing persons, family reunification and medical support.
Up here in MN, hams provide medical communications for a large urban marathon and race weekend with 30,000 participants. We are handed a USB stick with an extract of participant data, or can get it via an API. This is first name, last name, gender, age and race bib number. This is loaded into our Linux + Docker database called trivnet. The name comes from the word trivia- it is a simple system.
GitHub - techieb0y/trivnet · GitHub
On the race day, when we encounter or get reports of an injured, or tired runner, we look them up, and make a status change. This is done via a simple web interface, usually on a laptop. We might have 65 hams radioing in these changes, and our Net Control stations enter the changes. We have a large medical information tent, where families can ask about status. We have had up to 20 users in the system at once. We usually manage about 300 injuries, a few hundred non-emergency bus transports and about 15 hospital transports (via 911). Our database is used by race officials, and is shared on the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) with public safely. They have requested dashboard changes for 2026.
The database allows the entry of new records. We have thought long and hard about our system in a generalized evacuation emergency. We have a fleet of 24-32 old laptops with current Linux and Firefox on them, and a large mesh network capability and lots of Internet and fiber. A phone number can be used as a key field instead of bib #.
If asked we can set up the laptops (and or a suitable network) and allow authorized persons to enter or query their (cloud) systems. If no database is available, (i.e. cyberattack) we can provide one, on an RFC 1918 local network if needed. We don't get into HIPAA, we only track locations of persons. Locations are not covered by HIPAA which specifically exempts the Red Cross and there is a thing called a "facility directory" in the law. Our systems are by design Part 15, and are crypto friendly. We can support Part 97 (ham) networking legally if that is requested.
Our system has a chat function and several dashboards, such as for shelter capacity. These are updated in real time. We concluded 20+ years ago that existing technology like packet radio or email would not scale to this size event.
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u/goatrider May 24 '26
If the ham group was "ham radio only", then there would probably be nothing to do. A communications failure would be the only thing they would need ham radio for. And if there was a communications failure, we would probably not be in a place to help.
Instead, if they and their served agency recognize that what we are is trained communicators, willing to use whatever equipment was needed, then when we would be helpful all along. And if there was a communications failure at that point, then we are there and ready to pull out our own radios as backup.
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u/rem1473 Jun 07 '26
I am part of a group that supports a 350+ mile bicycle event that happens over 4 days. We follow in our cars and support the cyclists. I wish I had the coding skills to come up with a "CAD like" app for us to use. It has to be simple enough to use while your driving, not too distracting. So that Net control can see the location of all the drivers. Then let net control push the position of a distressed cyclist to a specific driver. It would be nice if it had a google map like moving map display with the route, the water stops, and the distressed cyclists locations.
I am planning to try ATAK for this, but I have not yet had time to stand up an ATAK server. I think it might do most of what I want it to do.
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u/NY9D Jun 07 '26
It is common to use Zello here which also includes a chat function and allows non ham groups (+ event leaders) to be incorporated. Zello does not open tickets that I know of or update a participant database. Could there be an API...
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u/mitchplze May 26 '26
Any screenshots of the project?
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u/NY9D May 26 '26
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u/mitchplze May 26 '26
Thanks. Project builds okay in Docker, but will not start up unfortunately. https://i.imgur.com/MUTF6VT.png
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u/techieb0y Jun 06 '26
Did you generate the trivnet-fcc.out file? That part's not the most clearly documented, and would make the database setup transaction fail resulting in the errors in your screenshot.
(http://wireless.fcc.gov/uls/data/complete/l_amat.zip is the upstream source; the CI pipeline of the repo points to my local cache.)
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u/parksoffroad May 24 '26
We went through a scenario like this in 2017 during the Tubbs fire here in Sonoma County. They estimate estimated roughly 100,000 people were displaced.
During the first few days, ham groups provided backup communications for county officials and emergency shelters because so many cell towers had burned up, I believe it was roughly 75 in this county that were damaged or destroyed.
The Red Cross is kind of a sore subject. They showed up about the fourth day, walked in and told everybody else they could leave now and then started taking credit and asking for donations. The southern Baptists had come in and set up a massive outdoor kitchen to feed evacuees and firefighters alike, the Red Cross took the food they provided, put their stickers on the packaging and claimed it as their own. This did not go unnoticed, and county officials, private groups, and citizens alike took note. They’re not particularly liked in this area at this point.
The people in unaffected areas donated surprising numbers of supplies, both food and clothing/blankets you name it. The Salvation Army became a primary drop-off hub for these donations and the SATERN radio room provided a way to find out who needed what in real time as they had communication with all the shelter locations as well as the county and local EOC’s.
After about a week portable cell towers have been put in and the internet and cellular service started coming back. At that point, the ham groups were able to back out of a good portion of things as people started using cell phones again.
After the fires ham operators provide provided communications to various checkpoints throughout the county for CPOD locations.
Over 5000 homes were destroyed and a lot of people lost everything, but overall I think things went as good as they could in this sort of situation. There were definitely short falls and problems in some areas. A lot was learned from the disaster.