BY KATHY BARATTA
Staff Writer
MANALAPAN – It will be off to the RACES this weekend when a unit within Manalapan’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) participates in a field day of sorts.
June 24 is the date set for members of the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES) to show their communications expertise; a skill that has been called into service in past times of national emergency and remains sharpened for the next time it is called upon.
Skip Gracon, 65, of Manalapan, has been involved in the RACES effort for several years. He said he has been a licensed ham radio operator since the age of 15. He is a member of the Manalapan OEM and is the RACES coordinator.
Gracon said the RACES event is an emergency communications exercise that has been conducted on a municipal, county and state level annually for 15 years. The exercise is always held on the last full weekend in June.
He said the event consists of communication command centers being established from which dispatches are relayed to emergency personnel by RACES members who use generators during the exercise and not conventional communications towers, as towers can be rendered useless in times of emergency. That is why the RACES members are called into service in times of emergency.
Gracon recalled that during one major snowstorm in the mid-1990s the governor declared a state of emergency and the RACES team set up command centers at town hall and the senior center. From those locations they were able to keep all necessary emergency responders coordinated.
More recently, RACES personnel nationally were the only means of communication in the immediate days following hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Gracon talked about his memories of communicating by radio during the cold war with people who were living behind the Iron Curtain in Europe.
He said that even in this day of the Internet, the fascination of ham radio operation retains its hold on him and others who take it up now, but especially for those who have been with it since the days of Radio Free Europe and other maverick enterprises that were the only hope oppressed people had that truth could break through the darkness of the state-censored information they received from their communist-controlled countries.
“When trouble is brewing, ham radio people are often the first to provide critical information and communications,” Gracon said.
Information about amateur radio can be obtained at the Web site www.hello-radio.org.