Hurricane Helene activation
DeKalb ARES was activated by DeKalb EMA to provide severe-weather and damage reports from the field to the DeKalb EOC during Hurricane Helene — the kind of situational awareness that amateur radio delivers when other infrastructure is stressed. The deployment was modest by Helene's broader standards, but it's the cleanest recent example of DKARES doing what it exists to do, on real EMA tasking.
What Helene was
Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend coast as a Category 4 late on September 26, 2024, then pushed inland through Georgia and into the southern Appalachians. The storm killed more than 230 people — most of them in western North Carolina, where weeks of antecedent rain combined with extreme mountain-valley runoff to take out bridges, cell towers, power lines, and fiber across whole regions for days. By any reasonable measure it was the most destructive storm to hit the southeastern US in a generation.
For an outward-facing, narrative-driven account of how amateur radio across the affected area — the Mt. Mitchell repeater, Georgia AuxComm, and informal ad-hoc nets — carried critical welfare and operational traffic when the commercial systems failed, see the Hurricane Helene story page.
What DeKalb ARES did locally
DeKalb County sat well outside Helene’s worst impacts but was within the storm’s wind and rain envelope. DeKalb EMA activated DeKalb ARES for the duration of the local impact, requesting:
- Field observations of weather and damage from members across the county
- Real-time situational awareness fed to the DeKalb Emergency Operations Center
- Net activity on the primary 146.760 MHz repeater for the coordination of those reports
This was an EMA-tasked activation — distinct from the weather nets DKARES opens on its own initiative for severe-weather situational awareness. When the County calls, the structure changes: net control is run with formal traffic procedures, reports go to a specific destination at the EOC, and the operation closes when the County releases ARES.
Aftermath and AAR
DKARES held an after-action review of the Helene activation at the October 2024 monthly meeting, combined with a member visit to the DeKalb EOC.
Why this entry matters in the public record
For a volunteer ARES group, the gap between weekly nets and a real EMA activation is conceptually large but operationally narrow — it should be the same procedures, the same operators, the same gear. Helene was the cleanest recent test of that for DeKalb. It was not a Western North Carolina–scale event for our county, and the public record should not overstate it. But the mechanics — EMA called, ARES answered, reports flowed — are the mechanics that matter when a worse storm comes.