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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>A fire started in an old abandoned cotton mill/
textile plant/ plastics plant in a nearby town. The building was 75
years old and had been several things in it's lifetime and never cleaned
out. There were all sorts of drums of old chemicals stacked up inside and
those were putting out toxic smoke that forced the evacuation of over 1000
people from the town. When the roof collapsed it pulled in the walls and
the concrete walls them provided a cover for the fire so that they couldn't get
water to the fire. Ladder trucks were brought in from Charlotte NC
and other towns. After 4 days two blackhawk helos were brought in with 750
gallon water bags and started dumping water on the building. After
approximately 280 dumps each in two days the fire was only smoldering.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Interesting notes:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The army radio op who was to talk to the helos from
the ground couldn't get either of his radios to work and asked my help for
diagnosing his radios. He said the frequency was simply 3040... he had no
clue what that meant and I didn't have a frequency counter. I suspected it
was 243.040, but not sure. As it turns out the speaker mics on BOTH his
radios were broken. One of our state guard guys had a sporties HT with him
and was able to get the pilots over to our 123.1mhz air frequency and he was
able to direct the water drops.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>We used rino gps radios to track the locations of
some of our people and xastir to display the positions. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>We were able to pull up street maps of the town,
plot ICP location and all the roadblock locations using xastir, print the map
and distribute to troops on the ground so they could visualize the
event.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The aiken county hams brought their _very_ nice
comms trailer which has satellite internet on the roof and a wifi access
point. We were able to use our wifi router in a "client" mode which
allowed us to connect to their wifi access point 1200 feet away. From
there it was easy to pull up terraserver photo maps for xastir and to send
digital camera photos out via email. They are a great bunch of guys, it
was a pleasure working with them! Something to note however is that they
had enabled WEP encryption using the ascii passphrase method and their router
would not tell me what the hex version of the key was. We ended up simply
turning off WEP and they'll pick a key in the future using hex.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Portable weather stations would have been
nice. If we'd had 4 of them we could have placed them around the perimeter
of the fire and known when the smoke was going to shift.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Typical problems we had to handle from the evacuees
ranged from a riot at the shelter on the morning of the 4th day to pets
left behind that needed food to diabetics needing to get to their insulin at
home.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The fire lasted from June 6 until
yesterday.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In our little comms trailer we have 4 normal
laptops, 1 panasonic toughbook, 2 HF radios (hf 6m, 2, 70cm), two kenwood d700s,
RINO radios, and twenty odd icom f21 GMRS radios and two aircraft am HTs.
I was able to setup the one of the kenwoods and a GMRS rino to monitor 150meg
police repeater, ham repeater talkin freq, monitor rino positions using a
dualband 2m70cm antenna, and the other kenwood to monitor two gmrs frequencies
on a GMRS antenna. If the aiken trailer had been running aprs (they have
the d700 radios already) we could have shared our aprs info with them and we
could have used it as an instant messenger between the trailers.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I threw together a little video of some of the
snapshots taken with a digital cam... </FONT><A
href="http://www.kd4rdb.com/scsg/GreatFallsFire(low-bandwidth).wmv">http://www.kd4rdb.com/scsg/GreatFallsFire(low-bandwidth).wmv</A><FONT
face=Arial size=2> if you have more than a casual interest, I can send you
a 10meg version of the same video.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Wes</FONT></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>