In a recent interview with APPA, Steve Wendell, Civil Engineering Supervisor at Oregon public power utility McMinnville Water and Light, discusses 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.
“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,” he said in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“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,” Wendell said.
In the interview, he was asked to elaborate on the types of emergency scenarios where the trailer could be utilized.
“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,” he said.
“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,” he noted.
“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.”
He said that is “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.”
Wendell also discussed the equipment that's been installed either in or on the trailer.
“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,” he noted.
“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,” he said.
“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 major emergency.”
He added, “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.”
Also, “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.”
He noted that “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.”
The complete transcript of the interview is available on APPA’s website.
