What changed
A history of amateur emergency service — edited Sep 5, 2026 by Unknown editor
This is the first recorded version, so every line is shown as added. Note: Imported from content/wiki
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Amateurs handled disaster traffic before anyone asked them to. What changed over a century is
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organization: from operators who happened to be on the air when a flood hit, to accredited volunteers
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with agency agreements, training records and assigned frequencies.
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## Before there was a structure
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Amateurs carried traffic out of the **1913 Great Lakes storm and Ohio floods** and the
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**1928 Florida hurricane** simply because they had working stations when wire lines went down. The
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pattern that repeats to this day is visible in the earliest cases: infrastructure fails locally,
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outside help needs to know what is happening inside, and someone with a radio and a notebook becomes
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the link.
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## AREC and ARES
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The ARRL organized the **Amateur Radio Emergency Corps in 1935** to make that response deliberate —
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enrolled operators, known frequencies, a local leader. Renamed the **Amateur Radio Emergency Service
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(ARES)** in **1978**, it remains the volunteer structure most US operators join, working under
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agreements with agencies such as the American Red Cross, National Weather Service and county
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emergency management. See [ARES and RACES](/wiki/emergency/ares-and-races).
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## WERS, and the wartime precedent
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With amateur operation suspended in the Second World War, the **War Emergency Radio Service**
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(1942–1945) let licensed amateurs run civil-defense VHF nets under municipal authority. It
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established the idea that amateurs are a manpower pool a government can call on, which is the direct
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ancestor of RACES. See [amateurs at war](/wiki/radio-history/wartime-service).
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## RACES, 1952
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The **Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service** was created in **1952** by the FCC together with civil
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defense authorities — a Cold War arrangement in which amateurs operate as registered volunteers *of a
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civil defense organization*, on specified frequencies, under government direction. RACES and ARES
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overlap heavily in practice, and in most counties the same people wear both hats.
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## SKYWARN and severe weather
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The National Weather Service began organizing trained volunteer spotters as **SKYWARN in 1971**, and
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amateurs became its backbone in much of the country: a net control on a repeater turning scattered
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reports into ground truth a forecaster can act on. Radar shows rotation; it cannot see a tornado on
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the ground. NARA's own partnership with the National Weather Service continues that work.
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## The nets that watch the tropics
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The **Hurricane Watch Net** (14.325 MHz) and the **Voice of the Hurricane Center, WX4NHC**, at the
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National Hurricane Center have gathered surface observations from amateurs inside storms since the
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1960s and 1980 respectively — barometric pressure, wind and damage reports from places with no
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instruments and no working phones. See [nets](/wiki/operating/nets).
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## The modern reference cases
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- **11 September 2001** — amateurs supported Red Cross and emergency operations in New York and
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Washington when commercial networks were saturated or destroyed.
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- **Hurricane Katrina, 2005** — one of the largest amateur deployments in US history, with operators
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staffing shelters and agency posts across the Gulf Coast for weeks; it also exposed how badly
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interoperability and logistics can go without prior agreements.
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- **Sichuan earthquake, 2008** — Chinese amateurs carried early traffic out of the affected region.
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- **Hurricane Maria, 2017** — the Red Cross requested about **50 amateur operators** for Puerto Rico
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to gather welfare and infrastructure information after the island's networks collapsed, the first
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deployment of its kind at that scale for the organization.
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## What the record actually teaches
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- **Training and paperwork matter more than radios.** Agencies deploy people they have credentialed
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and trained with, not whoever shows up. See
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[training and exercises](/wiki/emergency/training-and-exercises).
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- **Message discipline is the deliverable.** Accurate, brief, verifiable traffic is what an incident
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commander can use — see [traffic handling](/wiki/emergency/traffic-handling).
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- **The routine builds the capability.** Weekly nets, a working
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[go-kit](/wiki/emergency/go-kit) and drills are the reason the exceptional day works.
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## Sources and further reading
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- [Amateur Radio Emergency Service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Radio_Emergency_Service) —
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Wikipedia, for the AREC/ARES lineage.
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- [ARRL public service](https://www.arrl.org/public-service) — current ARES organization and
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agency relationships.
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- [SKYWARN](https://www.weather.gov/skywarn/) — the National Weather Service's spotter program.
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- [Hurricane Watch Net](https://www.hwn.org/) and [WX4NHC](https://www.wx4nhc.org/) — the tropical
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nets and their own histories.
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Continue with [emergency communications](/wiki/emergency), or back to
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[amateur radio history](/wiki/radio-history).