S1E107 - Ben on Communication After a Disaster

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Ben and Brooke talk about communication systems during a disaster. They cover basic communication infrastructure and equipment as well as what kind of information is vital to be able to communicate when cell phone towers go down. They also cover just how awesome amateur radio is.

Guest Info

Ben Kuo (he/him) is an amateur radio operator. Ben can be found on Mastodon @[email protected]

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Ben on Communicating After a Disaster

**Brooke ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today I'll be talking with Ben about communication and sharing information after disasters. But first, we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Jingle, Jingle jingle goes here.

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**Brooke ** 01:29 And we're back. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about communication and information sharing after a disaster. We'd love to know a little bit more about you if you're willing to share your pronouns and where you hail from and anything else that you want to say to introduce yourself?

**Ben ** 01:49 Sure. My name is Ben Kuo, and I am in Ventura County, California. My pronouns are he and him. And my background in disasters is I have been very involved in responding to disasters, providing information on social media, and making sure that people, you know, get the information they need to stay safe and stay healthy and help other people.

**Brooke ** 02:17 Nice. Was this something that you got into because of a disaster that happened? Or was it something you were interested in before...before it became useful in this context? If that makes sense?

**Ben ** 02:28 It's interesting. I really got involved in this in 20--I believe it's 2018--when Hurricane Maria hit, and hurricane Maria was a category five hurricane, and I am...one of my hobbies--and I have many hobbies-- but one of them is amateur radio. And for folks who have never heard of amateur radio, what it is, is a hobby where you learn how to use the radio and to communicate with people. And that is locally, you know, with people in your area, that is internationally. And you can talk to people all across the globe using just a radio, a power supply, a battery, and an antenna without any of the world being up. So that's no internet, no telephone, no power supply, no power grid. And you can communicate with people all over the world. And it's fun. And I started because it was a lot of fun. But it ends up being very, very, very useful nowadays with the increasing pace of disasters. And so I became an amateur radio operator partially because of the emergency aspect of it. There's a big community around it. But also just because it's a lot of fun for the technology and playing with the technology. So the big story of how I got into the disaster is Hurricane Maria was bearing down on the Caribbean. And it is...I don't know if you've seen the trend in recent years but hurricanes have been spinning up much faster and much more intensely. And it's called rapid intensification. And because of that you don't have quite the warning that you used to with hurricanes. And so people go, "Oh, we can watch this. And we can react." or "Oh, it's gonna be coming in a week." And that's not happening as much anymore. So what happens is someone says, "Hey, it's a tropical storm. We don't have to worry too much." And all of a sudden, it goes from a tropical storm to category five hurricane. This actually happened only a few months ago in Mexico. A tropical storm, everyone says, "Oh, it's just going to be a tropical storm." Even the expert of the National Weather Service said, "Oh, it's just gonna be a tropical storm." And it went from a tropical storm to category five hurricane. And it totally decimated a resort area in Mexico.

**Brooke ** 05:16 I had no idea. And it's interesting because I feel like I seem to hear about them going the other direction so often. Like, oh, there's a hurricane off the coast and it, you know--especially on our coast here on the West Coast--and then it dissipates into, you know, just a tropical storm or what have you. So I wasn't aware that we're seeing an increase of them going from tropical storm to hurricane. That's really interesting.

**Ben ** 05:40 Yeah, I think the scientists say, you know, it's an outgrowth of warmer oceans and with the climate crisis and all that, you have more energy. So it hits a warm spot in the ocean and all sudden, you know, it becomes quite crazy. So how I got involved is--I was not involved very much with emergencies and disasters, until hurricane Maria--and I was, you know, monitoring things here and there. And I learned that amateur radio was the only way to get to the...there's a little island nation called Dominica, it's not affiliated with any large country. It's kind of its own country. And they were cut off from the world by hurricane Maria. So they had, I guess they lost 90% of the roofs. They lost...they had no power system. They lost their telephones. And interestingly enough, everyone thought they were okay, because they didn't hear any messages from Dominica. They were like, "Oh, category five, it should be fine." And no one called for help. [Brooke exclaims incredulity] I got on--the amateur radio operators had already been active. There's an active Amateur Radio Group on the island. And I stumbled upon them and discovered they were in big trouble. And they were just begging for help. And so I stumbled in here--I'm all the way in California--and using the magic of amateur radio was actually talking to these folks in the Caribbean. And actually also using the internet kind of to bridge some of the parts of it. It's interesting, all the technology aspects. But the important thing ended up being that they were in a lot of trouble. There's no one to help, and they just needed to get information about what was going on. And I started relaying information to the amateur radio operators there in the region on what was going on, what help was on the way or not on the way. In the meantime, they actually had...the amatory operators actually arranged a rescue of the Prime Minister of the country. And that's like, you know, rescuing the President of the United States. Yeah, they