Ital­ian Radio Ama­teurs respond to Emil­ia Romagna region Earthquake
At 0200UTC 20th May 2012 an earth­quake of mag­ni­tude 6.0 struck the Emil­ia Romagna region of North­ern Italy. At the time of writ­ing this report six peo­ple are known to have died in the quake with 50 injured. A num­ber of strong after­shocks con­tin­ue to affect the area.
The Ital­ian Civ­il Pro­tec­tion author­i­ties are putting a response struc­ture into place capa­ble of deal­ing with >1000 peo­ple. The vol­un­tary group RNRE (Rag­grup­pa­men­to Nazionale Radio­co­mu­ni­cazioni Emer­gen­za ) report that com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the area are cur­rent­ly good but due to the con­tin­u­ing seis­mic activ­i­ty have been request­ed to make one or two mobile units avail­able to respond if need­ed until late Mon­day evening.
No HF fre­quen­cies are in use at this time.
— Greg Mossop, G0DUB IARU Region 1 Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Co-Ordinator.