At 2153 UTC on Tuesday 12th January 2010, a magnitude 7.0Mw earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.
News reports soon revealed that this was a major disaster.
Shortly afterwards, IRESC received, miraculously via email just before connectivity failed, a message from David Farquharson HH2QCS, who had helped with communications during the series of hurricanes that devastated Haiti in 2008. He had survived the earthquake but his home, high in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, was badly damaged.
Nevertheless, he was heading into Port-au-Prince to see what he could do to help. He said he would try to set up his amateur radio station. He witnessed a two mile stretch of cliffs above nearby gravel pits collapsing and knew that many deaths were inevitable.
IRESC went to a high alert level and commenced operations on their Echolink Conference with a formal net, hoping that some communications could be established either directly using VoIP or via a radio gateway situated within reach of Haiti. Manny Arroyo, NP2KW, was particularly helpful in making his HF Gateway facility available to IRESC from his advantageous location on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.
The IRESC Incident Database, which can be accessed by emergency agencies and can receive submissions directly from the general public, was heavily used to manage health and welfare enquiries and eventually stored over 300 items of information relating to the disaster.
In the early phases of the activation, traffic was almost entirely inbound to Haiti. With no reliable amateur radio path, relatives’ enquiries were routed to the Red Cross and Salvation Army bureaux for processing.
In the next few days, IRESC received further messages from HH2QCS and also from Jean-Robert Gaillard HH2JR; they made grim reading. HH2JR had lost several close family members. He also lost his cousin, Micha Gaillard, the Opposition Leader in Haiti. Jean Robert himself had been attacked by mobs. The two hams had not been able to communicate with each other since the earthquake.
The desperate scenes described were shocking. HH2QCS was, by now, leading the communications team for one of the major medical centres in central Port-au-Prince and was struggling with limited equipment to re-establish internet communications, but he had been able to arrange solar power.
IRESC continued to deal with the large number of hams seeking information. At one point, the IRESC Echolink conference had nearly 200 individual stations, links and repeaters connected to it.
Because IRESC has members in over 50 countries, there was always a Net Control Station available who could operate during their local daylight hours, thus preventing exhaustion or overnight shifts. Members who spoke French were contacted in case this became the language necessary for traffic handling. Such members monitored the only radio station that managed to continue broadcasting on the Internet, Signal FM, and provided translations of the public message boards and news reports hosted on the station’s website.
IRESC Net Control Station (NCS) operators were joined by colleagues from the National Hurricane Net, NIAR, HAMNET, ARES, RAYNET and others, to whom grateful thanks are extended. The net was streamed to the web via several outlets. HF communications were monitored in a variety of ways. In the region of 900 radio amateurs registered to become members of IRESC in a 72 hour period. All in all, this represented a truly remarkable international alliance between radio amateurs.
As the relief effort developed, IRESC collaborated with the Maritime Mobile Service net. The MMS net operates on 14.300MHz, the internationally agreed ‘Centre of Activity’ frequency for emergency communications. The net was in regular communication with Father John Henault HH2JH, a missionary from the Ile-a-Vache off the SW coast of Haiti, who travelled to the mainland to provide assistance and to establish a ham radio station. Father John regularly provided essential information and requests for supplies, principally fuel for his generator. These messages were relayed to the IRESC Echolink net by Bernie Farthing NP2CB for onward transmission to a variety of support agencies. As well as more traditional routes, traffic was also being received via Blackberry and SMS text, with some Haitians even managing to report via Facebook. All of this data was collated on the IRESC Incident Database and forwarded as appropriate. The Database was made an open source for any agency that found it of use.
IRESC Liaison Officer for the Eastern Caribbean, Julien Dedier 9Z4FZ, set himself up as a point of contact for radio amateurs travelling with relief teams, offering advice and assistance to smooth their passage through Trinidad & Tobago en route to Haiti.
IRESC Liaison Officer for Israel, Pinchas Aviv 4Z5RU, set the Magen David Adom network of VHF repeaters to relay the IRESC traffic so that it was heard across the whole of the country.
In conclusion, it is true to say that traffic out of Haiti was limited. The country’s infrastructure was so badly damaged that only the greatest of efforts lead to limited ham radio activity. The bulk of message flow handled by IRESC was of the Health & Welfare enquiry type. However, IRESC has benefitted from this significant mobilisation of its facilities; the learning curve has been steep and the debrief will be extensive. The IT systems, hosted on IRESC’s own servers, stood up well under the immense volume of activity.
NCS operators were well supported by always having several Assistant NCS members to work with them in the background, controlling the various online systems, managing the Incident Database, logging and dealing with off-net communications – not as glamorous as a net controller maybe, but the bedrock on which our organisation relies. When the next emergency comes, many more key agencies and contacts will be aware of what IRESC has to offer and will come to us earlier. Better working relationships have already been formed.
Correspondence was received from all over the world and diligently attended to. Radio amateurs worked with each other and found ways around the language and colloquial differences that will inevitably exist when the whole world meets in one place. But these radio amateurs had a shared goal – collaborating internationally is the very essence of IRESC - and the success of the operation demonstrates that it is possible to bring our diversity of cultures together in a single team.
IRESC has now dropped to a lower activation level but the net control structure has remained in place should any further help be requested. The fully activated net operated continuously around the clock for 384 hours. A slower but steady flow of requests for information on the whereabouts of individuals continues to arrive.
At 27th January 2010, the Haitian President Rene Preval said that 170,000 bodies had been counted. 245,000 commercial and residential buildings had either collapsed or were too badly damaged to repair. Father John HH2JH, Jean-Robert HH2JR and others have continued to report in to the Maritime Mobile Service and SATERN nets.
For further information, please contact Steve Richards g4hpe@iresc.org or visit our website at
