The following is a transcript of the April 7, 2025, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now.
I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s News Director.
Our guest on this episode is Steve Wendell, Civil Engineering Supervisor at Oregon public power utility McMinnville Water and Light. Steve is joining us to discuss a communications trailer developed by the utility that will enable it to communicate in the event that a disaster damages or wipes out communication systems regionally or nationally.
Steve, thanks for joining us.
Steve, before we dive into the details on the trailer, I wanted to give you an opportunity to describe your role and responsibilities at the utility.
Steve Wendell
McMinnville Water and Light provides water and power to our service area. Our engineering department has actually two groups, one’s an electrical engineering group and so that focuses on power and fiber projects, and then there's the civil engineering group which does public water projects.
I'm the supervisor for the civil engineering portion. I recently became the employee with the most years of service at Water and Light and all those years have been in this department, so I've done a lot of different aspects of power and fiber and water design. Basically, all of us wear many different hats and provide input and project management for an array of projects, so therefore the designing of this trailer was a great fit for us.
Paul Ciampoli
Diving into the main topic of this discussion, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about the factors that resulted in the utility deciding to pursue the development of the trailer.
Steve Wendell
Communication, of course, is an important part of our emergency response plan and originally the trailer was designed to be secondary office space or a backup server room and also a communication hub. So that was kind of the initial design.
We then built an actual off-site emergency building [that] can handle a lot of those needs, and so I wanted to focus on the communication part for the trailer and basically add more radios and more capability to that trailer.
Paul Ciampoli
Could you elaborate on the types of emergency scenarios where the trailer could be utilized?
Steve Wendell
Everybody talks about the earthquake that could happen on our side of America here. It's called the Cascadia Subduction Zone 9.0 earthquake and so that's one concern.
Another one would be floods. We get a lot of rain here in Oregon, so floods are always a concern. We have winter storms.
We've had a number of pretty heavy snowstorms over the years, believe it or not, even though we are known for a lot of rain here in Oregon.
We've had some pretty major wildfires as well. I think it was 2020 when we had a big fire that actually burned like over 1,000,000 acres, destroyed a lot of homes, and so those are concerns. Wind storms -- this goes back a lot of years -- but we had the Columbus Day storm in 1962 and that was over 100 mile an hour winds.
That's very unusual, but that could happen as well. Of course, most folks know of the volcanic activity –- Mount Saint Helens 1980...that could erupt again. We've got other mountains as well in our vicinity. And the last thing is EMP -- electromagnetic pulse -- that's something talked about – maybe in war time an enemy would set one off and that would destroy radios, communication, so i try to make some provisions to protect against that as well.
Paul Ciampoli
So what is the equipment that's been installed either in or on the trailer?
Steve Wendell
I tried to design this to do short, medium and long-range communication. For long, medium and short [range], we've got some Icom 7100s that are great radios.
We can talk around the world with those and we can also talk just within our county or our town here. We've got some YAESU 8900s -- they're also great for medium and short-range communication. We can talk across the state with those.
We've got some handheld radios for portability. We actually installed some of our digital radio systems -- we recently changed to a digital system.
So I installed three of those in our trailer, so we can use that as a dispatch, if needed. We also have some old Icom radios that were our original analog radios and I reprogrammed those for the HAM frequencies for emergencies – and I put those in some EMP bags, basically, that would protect against an EMP. They have an antenna and are able to be plugged into a battery and be able to communicate if there's a a major emergency.
We've got some consumer radios like GMRS and a CB in case we need to talk to folks who are using consumer type radios [and] a scanner for police and fire, being able to listen to what's going on in our locality here.
We’ve got a TV monitor with a digital antenna for news feeds -- lots of antennas on the roof. We’ve got a solar system on the roof as well so that we can run off-grid if need be. We actually have a large generator too that runs off propane if we needed to use that. And a weather station and some laptops that connect some of the modes, what they call in Ham radio, modes are different ways of communicating over the airwaves.
You have voice, you have Morse Code which is still used today. There’s some digital Modes as well and they use a computer system...probably the simplest way to say it would be like text over the airwaves. There's some software you can send photos and video over the airwaves as well, so we have some of those capabilities in the trailer as well.
Paul Ciampoli
A quick follow up question, if I could. I'd imagine there is periodically some testing of the equipment and assuming that's the case, do you have a schedule for that even if it's informal?
Steve Wendell
Yeah, it’s pretty informal, but we do do that. Ham radio, like anything, constantly changes, so there's advances all the time. To learn the new software and how the radios operate and the protocols and all of that takes some time and so when a person has a little bit of free time on their hands, we try to go out and do a little testing, a little bit of learning in the trailer. I've been working on trying to get some others getting their ham license as well, so we could have more folks than know how to operate the trailer. Definitely we'll need a pool of folks to be able to do that to work efficiently.
Paul Ciampoli
And just a wrap up question just looking at a bigger picture in terms of this type of trailer. If another public power utility considers pursuing the development of a similar communications trailer, what would you say are the key considerations that would need to be taken into account in terms of things like cost and timeline for completion?
Steve Wendell
I would think that you want to figure out how the communication trailer would fit into their emergency response plan – identify, maybe, possible resources. In this case, I utilized IT for some of the electronic needs, monitors and computers and such. The mechanic shop was great for...tools and things to work on the trailer.
There are three classes of amateur radio operators, licenses, technician, general and extra, and I would say that that if you're going to tackle a trailer like this, at least have a general or extra license classed individual work on it because of the technical aspect of the of the trailer itself.
And I would say design for the ultimate goal. It's not cheap to put one of these together, but you can do it in modules, in phases, so looking at it I kind of did the kitchen sink -- I went and tried to buy or procure as much stuff as possible to build this trailer. We did it in phases. It was over a year's timeframe for me.
The trailer was originally started in 2018, and then it just sat because the folks that started it retired or moved on and so when I got my HAM license at the end of COVID is when I started picking up the charge of adding components and designing what the trailer needed.
We probably have around $35,000 into the trailer. It doesn't mean that you have to put that much money into it. The trailer itself was probably about $10,000 – radios and that equipment.
Not cheap, but we have a lot of radios in this trailer. It doesn't mean you have to have that many, so there's ways of cutting costs and to make it work appropriately. I think our trailer is a good example of what can be done, but there's other examples out there too. CERT, which is the community emergency response team, and ARES, which is the amateur radio emergency service.
Counties across this nation have those groups and there's a number of those that have trailers with different capabilities, so those are good examples as well.
And, of course, we would be willing to definitely share our success and failures as well.
Paul Ciampoli
That's a great point, Steve. One of the goals that I always have with this podcast is to share information with other public power utilities.
And I think this is a perfect example of where there's a specific project that's up and running that people would probably want to know more about. So thanks for that offer and thank you for taking the time for speaking with us today.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA.
I’m Paul Ciampoli and we’ll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
