Used to live in a city where the ham radio group was actively involved in and integrated into the city’s emergency response plans. Their muster sites for a maj

Used to live in a city where the ham radio group was actively involved in and integrated into the city’s emergency response plans. Their muster sites for a major disaster had at least 50% of their space dedicated to radio equipment. Every community center had equipment installed on site. There was a large radio room in the regional emergency operations center building, a wackload of antennas on the roof, and a dedicated desk for the group in the main EOC room. The city paid for me to attend multi-day courses where some of the other 12 people in the room were “the chief of the fire department”. The group, internally, ran a multitude of training programs to ensure the people responding would be able to handle the tasks they would need to do. During some day-long simulations to test the emergency response, the city explicitly called a communications blackout to simulate all phone and other communication systems going dark and validate the capabilities of the radio group. There’s still a lot of value in amateur radio in an emergency… with an organized, trained group of people. Which across the multitude of places I’ve lived I’ve only ever come across once. So yeah, mostly just LARPing. (As a maybe-interesting side note… The average age in that group was substantially lower than anywhere else I’ve dropped in on a radio group as well.)