Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center have at their disposal some of the planet’s top technology to help them track and predict the path of a storm. The center roof is stacked with state-of-the-art satellite dishes. Forecasters receive eyewitness accounts of even the most menacing of storms from experienced pilots who fly dead center into a hurricane’s eye.

 

But there are times when what forecasters or emergency teams need comes from a decidedly low-tech operation: a ham radio operator whose only mode of communication is a battery-powered radio and an antenna made of wire.

 

And sometimes, that information reaches them courtesy of the coordination efforts of a retired Navy captain in Los Lunas, N.M.

 

Storms can flatten satellite reception and down power lines to the point that cell phones, land line phones and the Internet cease to function.

 

That’s when amateur ham radio operators can play a critical role — before, during and after a storm.

 

“We don’t have fancy equipment, but we do (generally) have big antennas and wide open spaces from which to broadcast information,” says Dave Lefavour, now in his second year as “Net Manager” of the Hurricane Watch Net. Hurricane Watch Net was started informally by an amateur radio operator in 1965 during Hurricane Betsy, and since that time, it has provided communications service during every hurricane threatening land in the Atlantic, Caribbean Basin and Gulf of Mexico, according to its Web site.

 
The information it provides ranges from real-time weather reports to a storm’s aftermath on the ground. “When (Hurricane) Ike came ashore in Galveston, FEMA was vitally interested in how deep the (flood) waters were. We were able to contact a few hams in the area and get them that information,” Lefavour says.
When a hurricane gets within 300 miles of land, Lefavour is the one who will “make that call” from his home in Los Lunas to a network of about 40 ham radio operators scattered across the continental U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico and Central America, telling them to “get on” the radio network.

 

In the Caribbean, one of the Net’s contacts is a Catholic priest on an island off the coast of Haiti, who acts as a “very reliable” reporting station with a church-top antenna and a radio powered by the sun.

 

Lefavour is the only one in New Mexico in the network.

 

The former fighter pilot says he organizes shifts like a personnel manager. “If they go out (away from the radio), they let me know when they’re coming back. It’s a well-oiled machine.”

 

He adds: “We only select very highly qualified, experienced operators who are willing to sit in front of a radio for 12 to 16 hours at a time. It takes a special person to be able to do that. We’re very proud of the people we have — and rightly so.”

 
Generally, a run lasts about three days — from the time a storm gathers 300 miles from shore to the time it has wound down. Those 300 miles average out to a day of note-taking, followed by two days of taking in and relaying “consistent, real-time ground-level winds and rain data” that is emanating from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami and other sources, Lefavour says.

 

Much of the information to and from the NHC — whose control room has been made famous by weather channel reports during storms — actually goes through another group of volunteer radio operators running what’s called the Amateur Radio Station within the NHC building.

 

Like Hurricane Watch Net, the Amateur Radio Station is run solely by volunteers and donations. It was started in 1980 by Julio Ripoll, an architect. “Hurricane Watch Net is always there listening for us — to be there for us — ready to relay (information), whether it’s to Washington, D.C., or Fort Worth, Texas,” he says.

 
The Amateur Radio Station is an independent entity within the NHC with decidedly humble beginnings. Ripoll told NMI he started the station while he was a student at the University of Miami and president of the Ham Radio Club. “I put some equipment in a box, put it on a (hurricane) forecaster’s desk, put up a wire on the roof and they loved it. We had equipment they never had before,” Ripoll says.

 

The NHC forecasters saw the benefits of amateur radio (”We could communicate two-way in real time, providing surface reports — basically eyewitness reports of the hurricane in real time”) and the station became permanent, Ripoll says. “The government hasn’t spent any money,” Ripoll adds. “Our equipment now is state-of-the-art, with radios and a computer and seven dedicated antennas, all different. (But) it’s all donated equipment and we installed it ourselves.

 

“We always want to be an asset — not just to the Hurricane Center, but to communities affected by hurricanes — and not be any burden to the taxpayer,” Ripoll says.

 

The coordinator at the Miami radio station, John McHugh, says the Hurricane Watch Net is “vital in that they help us gather data collected from states we sometimes can’t hear because of geography.” In some cases, the areas are too close. For example, Miami might not be able to hear Key West because of the “mirror effect” of signals bouncing off the ionosphere, but a station in Texas might hear it and act as a relay. Hurricane Watch Net is one of several operations that feed information to the Amateur Radio Station, including one that delivers information by Internet.

 

Operators at the Amateur Radio Station will hand NHC forecasters information they think they’ll need, McHugh says. They don’t always use that information, but sometimes they do. “Lots of times, we’ve made major contributions,” McHugh says, “like relocating an eye because they couldn’t find it on satellite.”

 

They’ve been especially useful when it comes to information from small islands in the Caribbean, where weather stations at airports shut down during storms. “NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) doesn’t get official weather (reports) then,” McHugh says. “We have people with home weather stations, and sometimes it’s the only weather data.”

 
Amateur radio operators provide information beyond weather as well. Lefavour recalls that during Katrina in 2005, a ham operator in New Orleans took his radio equipment to work. He wasn’t on the air when the storm went over, but as soon as the wind subsided, he went out, put his antenna up and checked in with Hurricane Watch Net. Unable to use his cell phone or land line, he reported over his radio that he saw looting. “Through a long series of relays, he ended up talking to the emergency operations center for that area,” Lefavour says, which managed to get a vessel with law enforcement officers from a different state to the site. “The next thing I heard: ‘Situation is well in hand’.”

 
Hurricane Watch Net also performs a service for members of the public, who get really hungry for news when a hurricane is bearing down on their own geographic area or that of their loved ones. In an average month, Hurricane Watch Net’s Web site gets 5,000 to 10,000 page views, Lefavour says, but during Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike it was up to 54 million views an hour.

 

Traffic was so high during Katrina and Rita that the network had to add bandwidth during those events. Because of that experience, HWN acquired additional bandwidth in advance of Ike. “Ike stretched us real thin but we never crashed,” Lefavour says.

 

The Web site also has a number of “hurricane products,” such as Storm Pulse, a graphic that shows a storm’s location. HWN also offers subscriptions to electronic bulletins as they come out of Miami. “Just as soon as it hits the wire, it’s in your inbox, for free,” Lefavour says. Another feature new this hurricane season is streaming audio, through which listeners can hear Hurricane Watch Net operators on the hurricane frequency (14.325 MHz) in real time. It’s only active during storms.

 

Some of the operators are so dedicated, they must be reminded to provide for their own safety first, Lefavour says. Stateside, operators comply with that: They’ll send their family members out of the area to a hotel or motel and then proceed to the local emergency operations center. (An example is the operations center set up in recent years at the fire station in the mountains east of Albuquerque, which was set up as a fire command center).

 
Once ensconced, the operators will assist in local communications and check in with Hurricane Watch Net on an hourly basis. “They’re always performing some sort of service,” Lefavour says.

 

In other countries, however, “it’s a totally different story.”

 

Once, Lefavour was talking to a young man in Belize “who spoke excellent English and had an operation set up in a basement. We told him the storm was getting real close and to get out of there.” But he stayed to the point where debris was flying around his house and he was forced to hunker down.

 
As Hurricane Ike increasingly lost power as it forged inland, ham radio operators who’d been following each other’s reports of its progress wound down their operations, too, which could be heard in real time on HWN’s streaming audio:

 

 

“I’m about 100 miles from Galveston. I thought I’d do what I could. Anyway, I’ll be monitoring … over.”

 

If you’re listening to the streaming, Lefavour advises to listen carefully. It’s a “very different language” and there’s a lot of static. Sometimes the signal is weak and bandwidth conditions change. “Hang in there,” he says, and the signal will come back.

 

During a conversation the day after operations for Hurricane Ike had died down, Lefavour was asked if another hurricane might be on the horizon. “Yeah, there’s a tropical wave off Africa, about 700 miles east of the Leeward Islands, although nothing is expected to develop from that.

 

“Famous last words.”