Ready Southeast Committee report 12/7/22

Exercise and Evaluation

We completed the second of two city-wide communications exercises. Our two person disaster assessment teams combed their part of the neighborhood looking for potentially hazardous conditions like leaning trees near homes and power lines. They located envelopes containing pictures that were left by other volunteers. They then crafted messages based on the pictures and radioed that to their Area Coordinator. In total seven teams participated with another five volunteers collecting and passing along the radio messages to the City’s Emergency Operations Center.

We identified a need for more practice in crafting concise messages that adequately describe the severity of the situation.

We’re back on schedule with our Second Sunday radio check-ins. In November we practiced changing channels to continue communicating as we would when others are already using the channel we typically use.   Forty two volunteers participated in the November 13 check-in

We reconfigured our neighborhood area map, altering the boundaries of #10 to better align it with Eugene-Springfield Fire Dept.’s evacuation zone 31

Volunteers

We’ve struggled to recruit new volunteers the last two years. Several roles in our organizational structure remain unfilled. Our Incident Commander, Don Metheny, is stepping down from his leadership role with Ready Southeast.  We’re having a get together in the Chapel at the Good Samaritan on the 10th at 1pm to thank Don for all his time and energy. SEN Board members are welcome to join us.

We’re reaching out to our volunteers in hopes of identifying a new IC as well as someone to serve as our Safety Officer,  head of Logistics, and liaison to the SEN Board.

We lost our good friend and volunteer, Tony Cooley,  to cancer in September.  Tony was a much beloved individual as was evidenced by the many friends and family who attended his memorial at The Shedd.  Tony provided us with his professional level map making skills for a number of years. He and John Murray worked together developing all kinds of maps, some that identify where our volunteers are located,  which of them can communicate solely with their FRS radios, and the topographical impediments to that communication.

We will miss him.