Quake 99

Quake 99 was an exercise of the Mississippi County Arkansas Office of Emergency Services and it's subordinate units to test it's ability to interact with Federal Disaster agencies.

The primary objective of this drill was to evaluate the capability of the Veterans Administration Healthcare System, National Disaster Medical System, State, Local, and Military units from the Southern Region of the United States to adequately deploy to a disaster site following an earthquake in the Blytheville Arkansas area and provide emergency medical care to a large group of victims.

Mississippi County Amateur Radio Association was the primary communications group during this drill. Our duties included local VHF and long range HF Communications. During the drill we were to pass information from our area to Little Rock AR by HF.

On the day before the drill our group did four test messages by VHF Packet to the State O.E.S. office in Conway AR. All messages were received and a reply was sent back to us in about thirty minutes with no errors.

On the day of the exercise HF propagation was very poor to the other station in Little Rock and required more time to pass a message. If we would have had a Packet link to this station on that day we could have sent the messages faster and with no repeats or errors. During this type of exercise or the real thing all modes of communication should be available for message handling.

We also have pictures of EQ 99 for your viewing. Some of the pictures show people with FAKE blood, broken bones, the communications room, rubble piles, search dogs, searchers, C-130 evac planes and others that helped out during the drill. Thanks to ALL!

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