Dis­as­ter recov­ery helped by ama­teur radio
The radio ama­teur com­mu­ni­ty was pre­pared when a super typhoon unleashed its fury on the Philip­pines, uproot­ing trees, snap­ping pow­er lines, spark­ing land­slides, can­celling flights and fer­ries send­ing 40,000 peo­ple to shel­ters. Claim­ing more than 200 human lives, it was the strongest of 16 typhoons in the coun­try this year, as Pablo (inter­na­tion­al­ly named Bopha) had heavy rain and wind gusts up to 210km/h. The Philip­pine Ama­teur Radio Asso­ci­a­tion (PARA) had emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions on 40 metres 7095 MHz and VHF as the typhoon made land­fall on Tues­day at North Davao in Mindanao.
It left a large foot­print of dam­age before exit­ing the coun­try. PARA is dis­ap­point­ed that its emer­gency use of 7095 MHz was not hon­oured by oth­er radio ama­teurs, who dis­turbed its oper­a­tion by test­ing equip­ment on air, tun­ing up, send­ing dig­i­tal sig­nals and some­times even try­ing to make con­tact as if it was a DX activ­i­ty. A stan­dard text will clear­ly iden­ti­fy emer­gency nets in future, as a world­wide reminder is issued not to QRM emer­gen­cies or train­ing exer­cis­es. With the typhoon now leav­ing the area of coun­try’s area of respon­si­bil­i­ty, the PARA HERO activ­i­ty is now closed.\’
Nation­al Traf­fic Sys­tem Co-chair­man, Rober­to C. Vicen­cio DU1VHY said he thanked every­one who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the endeav­our, and they did very well, exceed­ing all expectations.
— Jim Lin­ton VK3PC, Chair­man IARU Region 3 Dis­as­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Committee.