Off to the Races for Par-Troy's Emergency Services

Three men sat on a bench in a Veteran’s Park gazebo Sunday surrounded by discarded boxes of pizza, Dunkin’ Donut’s bags, bug spray, an old-fashioned ham radio and a 25-foot antenna.

They were speaking in code into the radio’s microphone, trying to make contact. They’d been there all night.

Across North America a similar scene played out as tens of thousands of amateur radio hobbyists participated in an annual national emergency communications Field Day on Saturday and Sunday.

The men, Mike Hartmann, Claus Fink and Al Goldberg, are part of the 17-member Parsippany branch of R.A.C.E.S., or Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service, who volunteer to serve the community.

“Our function is to support the town in times of emergency when normal communication infrastructure is strained by major events or damaged by weather,” said Hartmann, pointing to blizzards and floods as common examples of times when amateur radio is needed.

The job of the volunteers—all of whom must go through training and acquire an amateur radio license— is to step in and provide back-up communication capabilities when the town’s traditional forms are overloaded or unable to function successfully.

When R.A.C.E.S. comes in—usually about six times a year in Parsippany— it either frees up the town dispatchers to attend to the most crucial emergencies while they handle routine calls or it establishes a form of communication for the town to utilize when no other option exists.

During the weekend’s competition, Hartmann said everything went off as smoothly as possible, and with just over two hours left the group had made a connection with 207 different stations from here to Alaska.

Each of the three men got their amateur radio start in different places, but a common theme ran through each man’s story—a passion for public service.

“I got involved after 9/11," Fink said. “New York had no communication for three days, my friend’s a policeman who took me in right after it happened. You could see there was a lot of need for help in communications.”

For Goldberg, a background in the town’s CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) program led him to R.A.C.E.S.

“I got interested in R.A.C.E.S. having no background in ham [radios],” Goldberg said.

But he added that having the “ability to help people and provide service to the town” drew him in.

And to Hartmann, who is the R.A.C.E.S. radio officer for the Parsippany Office of Emergency Management, it was a teenage hobby that turned into a rewarding 20years of service to the community.

“Amateur radio is a multifaceted hobby, but one mode is getting involved in public service, that is why amateur radio services really exist,” Hartmann said. “I got interested 20 years ago because I wanted to help the community prepare for disasters.”

Hartmann also discussed the importance of R.A.C.E.S. and amateur radio communications during devastating national disasters like Hurricane Katrina, where groups like theirs were praised as having played an integral part in the
hurricane relief.

“A senior FEMA official called us the ‘last line of defense,’ that’s when we’re supposed to step in” Hartmann said. “During Hurricane Katrina there was absolutely no communication for thousands of square miles except for amateur radio—it was  one of the few programs that worked as it was supposed to during the disaster.”