The US Nation­al Guard had its Oper­a­tion Seis­mos, an earth­quake drill on Feb­ru­ary 3–6, and used radio ama­teurs to trans­mit mes­sages as it accessed com­mu­ni­ty dis­as­ter resources.
The Nation­al Guard 213th For­ward Sup­port Com­pa­ny at Cedar City Utah, the Sher­if­f’s office, City Police, Fire Depart­ment, local hos­pi­tal and the Rain­bow Canyon’s Ama­teur Radio Club were involved.
Iron Coun­ty Emer­gency Man­age­ment Coor­di­na­tor John Higley, describes how the mes­sages, to and from the Emer­gency Coor­di­na­tion Cen­tre, includ­ed some inno­v­a­tive techniques.
Don Blan­chard WA7GTU of the Rain­bow Canyon’s Ama­teur Radio Club said that about 160 radio ama­teurs who were in con­tact with each oth­er includ­ing the hospital.
He said: “Teams were deployed to var­i­ous sites to do sim­u­lat­ed dam­age assess­ments and report­ed in using both voice and dig­i­tal communications.”
The dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions them to pro­vide mes­sages direct­ly into the required gov­ern­ment forms (IC-213).

Don WA7GTU said the exer­cise was high­ly suc­cess­ful and showed the hams could inter­face with the Nation­al Guard and worked on how best han­dle traf­fic that they might need to send.
He said although a few snags were found, we were able to quick­ly work around them and felt that the exer­cise was high­ly successful.
Some of the key peo­ple that made it all suc­cess­ful were Brad Bie­der­mann WA7HHE, George GallisAL7BX, Lin­da Shokri­an KG7PBX, and Ken Richter KR7KR.
Mean­time, the Iron Coun­ty Emer­gency Pre­pared­ness EXPO for 2016 will be held in June, to be called ‘Pre­pared­ness in the Park’ and like­ly to fea­ture a new com­mu­ni­ca­tions trailer.
— Jim Lin­ton VK3PC, Chair­man IARU Region 3 Dis­as­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Committee.