Eagle-Eyes woke Me, Myself, & I up the other morning at 4 a.m. and yelled, “Look at this headline in the P.D.!” – County vulnerable to telecom sabotage. “Oh, oh!” said Me.“Here we go again,” I added. Myself entered the conversation with a new acronym – WOOO! Me asked, “What does WOOO stand for?”

 WOOO! = We’re on our own! 

The main question, which has been asked thousands of times since Katrina is, “In an emergency situation or a natural disaster (like a hurricane or an earthquake), and all types of communication are down or fail to function – how do you communicate? This question was the focus of an Internet TV show, produced on October 16, 2005, that included a Sonoma County Office of Emergency Services administrator, the Petaluma Fire Chief, a volunteer Ham radio operator, and a local citizen.

In the course of the discussion, by this panel, they offered suggestions that could be used by first responders, businesses, schools, hospitals, as well as individual households and neighborhoods that might be cut off from the rest of the county. The recent incident in Santa Clara County (4-9-09), when phone service was interrupted due to severed telephone lines and caused a state of emergency to be declared, presented quite a challenge for police and firefighters. Calling 9-1-1 failed to work. The outage also disrupted Internet service all the way to San Francisco. The one form of communication that seems to save the day is amateur radio. It gets the message through when all else fails.

Think about it. Stay tuned for additional blogs on this Petaluma360 site that will offer suggestions about how to Be Ready and to Be Prepared. Better yet, take the time to read a few of the 40 Emergency Preparedness blogs that have already been posted over the past three years. Hammerhead thinks some of them really do “hit the nail on the head.”