[LINK] FW: home emergencies

[Ash Nallawalla]

> From: Tom Koltai

> It is 3:30 am in the morning.
> 
> What warning system would wake you up, get you out of the house and and
> safe.

Assembling my training from past lives:

As a 19-yo air-raid warden in the 1971 Indo-Pak war -- a combination of
warning systems is best. The best one was not available to the general
public, but every time the air-raid siren went off, my friend's dad's phone
would also ring. He was the deputy chief of Civil Defence in Bombay. I don't
know if a suburban telephone exchange can ring every landline at the same
time.

As a radio amateur in NZ training to join the AREC in the late 1970s:
http://www.nzart.org.nz/nzart/arec/ (has links to WICEN in Australia) I know
that the best bands for short-distance comms over wooded hills were 3.9 MHz
and 7 MHz. At least in the hilly southern end of the South Island, VHF (146
MHz) and UHF (430 MHz) were unusable unless the two ends were line-of-sight
or had a handy repeater within range. 26 MHz CB (NZ used 26 not 27) was
worse owing to the lower power and inability to break through the trees and
hills. Radio amateurs can only help other agencies and only if called upon.
Nowadays, they have portable HF-to-VHF repeaters that can be used in
difficult radio situations. I'd be interested to hear if the CFA fire trucks
went out of UHF range in the recent fires.

I was living in the US when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and the TV channels
went into overdrive, predicting a nuclear strike on the eastern US seaboard.
They interviewed many surprised building occupants whose building sported a
faded sign that said it was a bomb shelter -- most had become storerooms or
their food supplies had not been refreshed in 20 years. The radios and TV
stations played tests of the Emergency Broadcast System warning message. I
see that the EBS has now been replaced by the EAS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System which can reach people
via TV, radio, and cable TV. 

Someone mentioned the CFA/CFS sirens. I think that indoor ambient noise has
gone up since the 1980s and certainly since the 1950s, so you'd need to be
within sight of the station during the day to hear the siren. I used to live
one street away from the Werribee CFA and I'd only hear the siren if I was
in my back yard at night.

As an RAAF officer sent to the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 (doing minor spot
fire cleanup only), we used the yellow bricks operating on the VHF military
band around 200 MHz -- fine only for line-of-sight contact.

Today, I'd be happy to see a combination of alert systems being used in
parallel, so that the majority of people would get the warning. Ironically,
in the recent heatwave during the fires, we had no power for many hours and
discovered that our "emergency radio" had flat batteries.

- Ash