The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency held its ACS/RACES Conference on Saturday September 26th.  I was able to attend and saw many familiar faces from Western Pennsylvania.  Below are a couple of points that were discussed at the conference that I thought were noteworthy.   

 PEMA is moving ahead with their plan to implement a Pennsylvania Auxiliary Communications Service (ACS) which will include RACES, ARES, Civil Air Patrol, MARS, NWS Skywarn, REACT, US Coast Guard Auxiliary and local clubs.  You should take notice that some of these groups are not specifically amateur radio groups and their members may not be licensed amateur radio operators.  The RACES RO and RACES Deputy RO positions will be phased out and replaced by an ACS Officer and ACS Deputy Officer.  The state will be instructing each county EMA to appoint an ACS Officer and an ACS Deputy Officer from within the included organizations.  The ACS Officer’s role will be in the EOC and they will oversee all communications groups when activated.  There is a very real possibility that the county EMA may choose someone who is not a licensed amateur radio operator.  If you are currently the local RACES RO or DRO, I would strongly suggest that you familiarize yourself with the PEMA ACS plan and get in touch with the local county EMA office to express your continued interest in emergency communications.  If they don’t know that you are interested, you may be overlooked for the new positions.   PEMA will be pushing the EMA’s to incorporate the new ACS organization into local drills.  You will likely see an increased amount of activity from local EMA directors with regard to auxiliarry communications during drills.

 The Duly Enrolled Program was discussed and worthy of mentioning here.  For those of you who are not famulair with this, the Duly Enrolled Program is spelled out in Chapetr 115 of the Emergency Management Service Code.  This provides for limited amounts of insurance coverage of volunteers acting on behalf of local EOC volunteer (that’s us) activations.  There are some requiremnets to qualify as Duly Enrolled such as having an RACES ID card (I assume any future ACS ID’s will count as well) and being included on the RACES/ACS roster which is maintained by the county.  This is a detail that should not be overlooked as it provides some protections for RACES/ACS volunteers during an activation and/or drill.  Talk to your lcoal EMA officials to be sure this is done properly in your lcoal county. 

 Harry Bloomberg W3YJ (the WPA Section ARES Assistant Emergency Coordiantor) and Dave Kleber KB3FXI (The Alleghany County RACES Dupty RO) were both on hand with a presentation about the NBEMS digital software we have adopted as a standard in WPA Section.  You should have seen the room when they dsiplayed an ICS-213 message form and showed how this software can be used to send ICS-213 format messages from one location to another.  They certainly had everyone’s attention!  This is a new feature for the NBEMS software which is not available to the public just yet.  Look for an announcenet from Harry about the new NBEMS software very soon.

 There is an effort to establish Amateur Radio Workgroups within the regional task forces that cover the commonwealth.  One such group has been in place for several years now in the South Central Regional Task Force.  They gave a presentation about what they do and what is envisioned for other task forces as they get staretd with these workgroups. 

 Another presentation was by Gary Blacksmith WA3CPO from the Central Pennsylvania Amateur Radio Data Network.  This group is in the process of building an independant computer network that works on Part 15 runes as well as amateur radio rules.  They are building a private network which will connect several EOC facilitiesin the Harrisburg region with the PEMA offices in Harrisburg and will provide live internet capabilities at each site.  The presentation gave details of the equipment used and the costs involved.  The outlined plans for expansion of the system across the state but are in need of interested people to help build out the system.  Gary can be contacted at wa3cpo@arrl.net.