FEMA Communications Exercise

From National Headquarters:

As many of you already know, CAP was involved in a major FEMA communications exercise today.  In fact, we were the exercise.

At the personal request of the FEMA Administrator, Mr. Craig Fugate, CAP sent ten Immediate precedence messages through our HF network to his ten FEMA Region Administrators.  The message instructed them to send him a personal email advising him when they got the CAP message.  Mr. Fugate requested this exercise during a face-to-face meeting in Washington two weeks ago with the CAP Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Donny Rowland.

The exercise was strictly “no notice”.  Even the FEMA regions had no idea this was coming.  It was intended to be a surprise and bring attention to alternative methods of communicating—especially HF.

We received a phone call from Mr. Fugate’s military advisor this morning starting the exercise at 1257Z.  We generated the ten pre-arranged messages and tried calling any FEMA station on their HF frequencies for about ten minutes.  When that was unsuccessful we turned to CAP and began calling CAP Net 9 stations to begin sending the Immediate messages.  We were able to get the FEMA 4 message to 202SERCAP and the FEMA 8 message to 042RMRCAP on Net 9 before the morning HF net started.

Burlington Composite Squadron Newsletter | High Five – March 2013