Grey County ARES held its Simulated Emergency Test on Saturday October 17th, 2009.  The scenario for this exercise was a December ice storm in Grey County that led to long power outages, caused many municipalities
and the county to declare emergencies and to set up warming centres for residents who had no heat .  An  H1N1 flu outbreak added to the background of this scenario. 

The exercise began on the third day of power and communications outages.   For this exercise, all of the local repeaters were out of service, either from lack of power or from antenna damage caused by ice buildup.  All communication was done using 2m simplex or HF.  The EOC at the Grey County Building in Owen Sound, the EOC at the Owen Sound firehall, the Durham EOC at Rockwood Terrace and the EOC at the Hanover firehall were activated for this exercise.

Participating in the exercise were Jon VA3CIC, Dan VE3CLD, Fred VA3STG and Bob VE3LKD.  No other agencies were involved in the exercise.  All the messages were pre-arranged and timed for release, but the ARES operators had to put them in standard NTS radiogram format.

During the  three hour exercise, a total of 19 messages were sent and 19 were received.  Since the exercise forced us to use VHF for local messages and HF for longer distances, some of the messages required 3 hops to be delivered.  This generated another 18 receive-and-forward messages.  Each station averaged 14 messages during the exercise.  This exercise did not include any out-of-county messages,  or contact with provincial EMO.  We did make one contact with the 40m COMSONT net during an unsuccessful attempt to switch our HF link from the 80m band to the 40m band.

While all of the EOC locations involved in this exercise do have emergency power sources, we did not use them for this exercise.

 This exercise was also the first to include the newly  equipped EOC station in the Grey County Building.

We wish to thank all the ARES participants listed above, Gina Greig from Grey County and Terry McDonald, Deputy Fire Chief in Hanover for coming in on a Saturday morning so we could use their stations, and the Fire Chiefs, CEMCs and facility administrators who opened their facilities and hospitality to us for this exercise.

 Bob Droine, ARES Emergency Co-ordinator, Grey County