Earth­quakes in Spain
Two earth­quakes of mag­ni­tudes M4.4 and M5.2 struck the Region of Mur­cia (south­east­ern Spain) in the evening of 11th April, caus­ing at least 8 dead and 167 wound­ed in the town of Lor­ca, due main­ly to debris falling from some buildings.
The Span­ish Gov­ern­ment has acti­vat­ed the Nation­al Plan for Earth­quake Risks, send­ing to the area the fol­low­ing resources: Mil­i­tary Unit for Emer­gen­cies (225 peo­ple equipped for Search and Res­cue tasks), Nation­al Police and Civ­il Guard (400 peo­ple plus SAR dogs and gear to work under­ground, two trucks for spe­cial tasks and three heli­copters) and the Span­ish Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (mobile SATCOM unit).
The Span­ish Red Cross has sent to the area 24 ambu­lances, 3 field hos­pi­tals and 6 teams to pro­vide shel­ter facil­i­ties for 3.750 peo­ple. The Mur­cia Region­al Author­i­ty is co-ordi­nat­ing the oper­a­tions through its 112 Oper­a­tions Cen­ter and a Mobile Com­mand Post, pro­vid­ing also more than 100 ambu­lances and a field hos­pi­tal. Local police and fire­fight­er teams are also work­ing in the area.
It is esti­mat­ed that around 20.000 peo­ple spent the night out of their homes due to after­shocks rang­ing from M0.7 to M4.0. The local hos­pi­tal in Lor­ca has been evac­u­at­ed due to some struc­tur­al damages.
The REMER (Red Radio de Emer­gen­cia, Emer­gency Radio Net­work), an offi­cial emer­gency unit of the Span­ish Nation­al Direc­torate of Civ­il Pro­tec­tion and Emer­gen­cies (DGPCE) made up of ama­teur radio oper­a­tors, was deployed to the affect­ed areas as one of the emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions assets enlist­ed in the Nation­al Plan for Earth­quake Risks. REMER units used VHF sim­plex and repeater links to pro­vide addi­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels with the authorities.
A nation­al net­work in HF was also acti­vat­ed to send real-time infor­ma­tion to the DGPCE HQ in Madrid. As a gov­ern­ment unit, REMER usu­al­ly uses fre­quen­cies out­side the ama­teur bands to pass emer­gency traffic.
The telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies oper­at­ing in Spain deployed also 6 mobile base sta­tions to the area in order to accom­mo­date the expect­ed increase in GSM traffic.
— Greg Mossop, G0DUB IARU Region 1 Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Co-Ordinator.