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'I'm alive' messages reach families
Bay area amateur radio operators transmit and pick up messages from Biloxi and send them worldwide.
By LETITIA STEIN
Published September 5, 2005
TAMPA - Hope and tragedy alike crackle back and forth at the Tampa Amateur Radio Club.
"PLEASE COME GET YOUR MAMA."
"I'M OKAY. CHECK ON SIMON (DOG)."
"I AM IN SHELTER. MY SON JAMES DID NOT MAKE IT. HE DROWNED."
Using ham radio, Tampa Bay area volunteers are sending "I'm alive" messages around the world from people holed up in shelters in Biloxi, Miss. Hurricane Katrina may have knocked cell towers down and scrambled telephone land lines, but where modern technology has failed, amateur radio operators in Biloxi still can transmit messages to Tampa, where they are relayed by telephone to loved ones or others.
This weekend, Tampa's amateur radios have carried about 100 messages. "I'm okay," stated many simply, with directions on how get the news to family and friends.
One evacuee asked to contact the Kazakhstan Consulate. Another's message - to a telephone number in Germany - required translation for a Spanish-speaker who picked up.
Volunteer Bart Houser delivered this message to the sister of a Biloxi evacuee in northern California: "WE NEED CLOTHES, TOILETRIES, GAS, MONEY. EVEN A MOTOR HOME IF YOU CAN SWING IT. LOST ALL HOMES. LOVE YOU."
As soon as she got the message on Saturday night, 49-year-old Kimberly Steele called back in tears.
"We'd been so worried," said Steele, who had been sleeping with a phone next to the bed, a cell phone on her at all times.
She knew that her sister, Candyce Fink, 50, who lives in a Biloxi mobile home, had waited out the storm in Pensacola. But as days passed without contact, Steele trembled at reports of violence, and people getting hurt returning to unstable homes.
She never expected relief to arrive via Tampa radio.
"Ham radio is really invaluable when it comes to disasters like this," Steele said. "They are the only ones that can get through to people when all other communication methods are down."
Other messages aren't easy, Houser said, recalling one man's message that he couldn't reach his mother and brother. The person he contacted had learned that both were confirmed dead.
"It's a roller coaster, up and down," said Houser, 62, of South Tampa.
The 83-year-old Tampa club - W4DUG - has broadcast daily since Thursday, when several members deployed to take radio equipment to hurricane-devastated regions.
Late Saturday night, they helped to provide communications for the arrival at Tampa International Airport of a military aircraft with 48 evacuees from New Orleans, many requiring hospitalization.
The club works out of a concrete building in North Tampa. The headquarters has no windows, but a potent outlet: radio transmitters with glowing dials and a 110-foot antenna.
"We'll be here for as long as the mission continues," said Mike Fletcher, 53, of Valrico, assistant emergency coordinator with Hillsborough County Amateur Radio Emergency Service.
On Sunday, Fletcher worked the dials wearing a polo shirt embroidered with his radio call letters, NI4M. He brought "survival doughnuts" for a half-dozen of the station's 125 volunteers .
About half are male retirees. On typical Monday nights, they chatter on radio frequencies that the federal government has assigned to nonprofessionals.
But their knowledge of emergency communications is amateur in name only. As hurricanes crisscrossed Florida last year, the Tampa Bay club helped to coordinate communications in Punta Gorda and Wauchula.
This weekend, six volunteers transmitted "I'm Alive" messages from Biloxi while waiting to start a bigger mission. They are setting up a state-owned mobile communications system to allow emergency responders with different equipment to talk to one another.
On Sunday afternoon, the team was deployed near Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Back at the Tampa headquarters, other volunteers stood by to help.
Houser's cell phone buzzed. The woman that he helped in California was calling. Thanks to his initial message, she had managed to contact her sister in Biloxi directly.
"My heart's growing bigger," Houser said.
--Letitia Stein can be reached at 813 661-2443 or lstein@sptimes.com
[Last modified September 5, 2005, 01:15:10]
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