Hams Respond to Calls for Assistance as Ice Storms Pummel New England

[ARRL]

As a major ice storm -- accompanied by freezing rains, flooding and strong winds -- severely impacted New England on Thursday evening into Friday morning, ARES®, RACES, SKYWARN and MARS operators worked together to respond to calls for assistance from served agencies and to participate in the recovery phase of the storm. As the storm progressed into the weekend, ice accumulations up to 1.5 inches were common throughout a very large area of Western, Central and Northeast Massachusetts, as well as parts of New Hampshire and Maine.



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[mackmobile43]

As a major ice storm -- accompanied by freezing rains, flooding and strong winds -- severely impacted New England on Thursday evening into Friday morning, ARES®, RACES, SKYWARN and MARS operators worked together to respond to calls for assistance from served agencies and to participate in the recovery phase of the storm. As the storm progressed into the weekend, ice accumulations up to 1.5 inches were common throughout a very large area of Western, Central and Northeast Massachusetts, as well as parts of New Hampshire and Maine.



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Excellent but memories of my childhood in Ms. include many ice storms and in particular this one storm it was 13 days from the time our power lines hit the ground until the big bucket trucked came to restring our wires.

Don't know if hams had anything to do with or not beacause my dad was away on business and his ham radio was useless to us because we had no AC power to operate it anyway, all the phone lines were down also, that's back when they were on poles as you may have deciphered.

My point is the real heros here are the public servants who suffer to the weather conditions and risk their lives as well to make us comfortable and I give them thanks for all they do.

 

[EDUK8TR]

Excellent but memories of my childhood in Ms. include many ice storms and in particular this one storm it was 13 days from the time our power lines hit the ground until the big bucket trucked came to restring our wires.

Don't know if hams had anything to do with or not beacause my dad was away on business and his ham radio was useless to us because we had no AC power to operate it anyway, all the phone lines were down also, that's back when they were on poles as you may have deciphered.

My point is the real heros here are the public servants who suffer to the weather conditions and risk their lives as well to make us comfortable and I give them thanks for all they do.

So you didn't even have a car battery to hook to the rig for emergency power?

 

[mackmobile43]

So you didn't even have a car battery to hook to the rig for emergency power?

I was 10 years old and my mother was a woman duheeeee, we had no idea of how radios worked and if memory serves it was a crappy Siltronix 1011c anyhow so people would have had to chase us all over the band plan to see what we wanted.

So we Mississippians being a resourceful lot placed all our refrigerated items in a clean 55 gallon grease drum which had one of those snap-ring styles lids on the back porch so they would'nt spoil and we had tons of canned food, we did have to travel several miles to the nearest country store which had power thus they had water we could haul home in some new 30 gallon plastic trash cans so we could cook and flush the toilet but a bath was out of the question and I know what you're thinking, I never said we did'nt wash, we just did it with a minimal amount of water and heat was by means of good old seasoned oak gathered the previous summer.

We had propane for cooking but I liked my deer cooked on the open fire.

My mother and her 8 children fended off the wolves and lived to tell the tale but it sure was nice not to have to fill oil lamps after the power came back on and the ham radio did all it could and that's just sit and wait for it's licensed operator to return.