Daily Archives: Sep 25, 2022

Koeberg Simulated Emergency Exercise 22nd September 2022

Posted on by

In line with regulatory compliance for the management of a nuclear power station, regular safety exercises are held which involve a broad range of different agencies, which come together to practice their response coordination activities for dealing with any emergency which may threaten the safety of citizens living in the vicinity.

This exercise was led and coordinated by the City of Cape Town Disaster Risk Management Centre in Goodwood. Designated representatives from a broad range of agencies were assembled at Goodwood DRM to experience the full progression of the exercise from the first initial contacts, through the escalation levels, coordination, and the stand down and debriefing. Not only were there representatives participating from various provincial and city departments responsible for health and safety, water and sanitation, traffic services, environmental affairs and tourism, education, emergency medical services, recreation & parks, fire & rescue, agriculture, corporate media, human settlements, but also agencies such as HAMNET, Robben Island Museum, the SPCA, SABC media, SA National Defence Force, SA Police Service, Golden Arrow Bus Services, MyCiti busses, and a Koeberg technical advisor. As the Strategic Room was fully occupied, an upstairs auditorium was utilised for the monitoring by agencies such as the National Nuclear Regulator and others who could listen in to all the communications and watch the proceedings on projection screens which mirrored the video wall in the Strategic Room.

On Thursday 22 September 2022 the exercise was triggered in the early morning with an Unusual Event being declared by Koeberg to the City of Cape Town Disaster Risk Management Centre, for a simulated problem involving their pressurised water systems. This level is also triggered by anything unusual, such as a veld fire in their vicinity, jellyfish blocking a water cooling intake, etc. The Koeberg Station would normally try to deal with this alert level resolution on-site themselves. Every written and verbal communication was preceded with the words “THIS IS AN EXERCISE” to prevent any misinformation being broadcast outside of the exercise.

Bulk SMS messages were received by all participants to inform them of the situation. Normally, if this type of situation had developed at Koeberg, it would have escalated over a period of 2 or 3 days, but for the purposes of the exercise the time scale was compressed, so a while later Koeberg simulated some containment issues based on the loss of Fission product barriers, and they declared an Alert event level which was sent out to us by SMS necessitating the onsite assembly of the role-players at the Strategic and Tactical Rooms.

From this point our various teams reported our arrivals, and updates were sent through, using formatted message sheets. HAMNET, according to its plan, dispatched two members with one being present for the Strategic Room, and the other ready to man the radio room if required. HAMNET also sent a message to state it had additional members on standby if required for deployment to areas that had lost communications.

The exercise escalated through the Site Emergency severity level to one of General Emergency where members of the public and schools were to be evacuated within a certain radius downwind of the Koeberg station with the assistance of two bus services. At this stage roadblocks and holding points were in place, a Mass Care Centre had been established upwind of the station, frisking for radioactivity and decontamination were being performed, dosimeters were issued, and Potassium Iodide tablets were being issued or administered where needed.

At midday, after the simulated emergency had been contained, we all received the stand down SMS, and a lengthy debriefing period started. Every agency gave their feedback and a critique of their own performance, including many suggestions for future improvements. There was unanimous agreement by all the agencies, as well as observers, that the exercise had been a great success.

The purpose of the exercise was not just to perform all the procedural steps as per the planning, but more importantly to see how all the different agencies cooperated together as a team, and also to forge relationships with those who we will be working together with in future, if any real disaster requires it. And to this end the exercise was also a great success.

HAMNET was not required to deploy into the field as part of this exercise, but the role we were prepared for, was to bridge any communication gaps that might have arisen resulting from flat batteries and a blackout situation for the cell-phone towers or the TETRA radio network. As recently as two months ago, HAMNET WC had done a hands-on demonstration to the City and Provincial Disaster Managements, showing that we could establish radio communications across the Western Cape Province in the absence of any telephones or Internet connectivity. This is also the reason the City of Cape Town DRMC had funded and set aside a dedicated radio communications room for HAMNET to manage on their behalf.

HAMNET Western Cape was represented by Danie van der Merwe ZS1OSS and Dave Reece ZS1DFR.

Included is a picture of our dedicated radio room at Goodwood Disaster Risk Management Centre, which has facilities for all the usual amateur bands, crossband relays and all the usual digital modes, as well as monitoring of Aircraft and Marine traffic. We are linked to the internet, and run Echolink relays from here.

ZS1DCC

The station was established by Alister van Tonder ex ZS1OK, now ZS2OK, and is currently managed by Danie van der Merwe ZS1OSS. Its call sign is ZS1DCC.

Report prepared by Danie ZS1OSS

HAMNET Report 25th September 2022

Posted on by

Tropical Cyclone Fiona, which entered the Caribbean this week, and has exerted its might on the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and then Bermuda, has turned out to be far more fierce than originally anticipated. Wind speeds of up to 220 km/h have been experienced, and by Wednesday, it had strengthened to a category 3 hurricane, with about 2 million people in the path of winds of at least 120km/h. Very heavy rainfall, and storm surges were being experienced. Over 2000 people were still in evacuation centres.

In Puerto Rico, 8 people died, and 1300 were sheltered, while there were 2 deaths in Dominican Republic, 13760 displacements and over 1000 in shelters. Guadalupe experienced widespread damage to infrastructure.

In extracts from the ARRL Letter of Thursday, we hear that the National Hurricane Centre (NHC), the Hurricane Watch Net (HWN), the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Hurricane Net, and the Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network (SATERN) all have been engaged in tracking Hurricane Fiona.

Amateur radio operators have been reporting weather conditions since Monday, September 19, 2022, and have received positive feedback on their assistance. The VoIP Hurricane Net was active for 14 continuous hours on Sunday, September 18, for Hurricane Fiona, as it pummelled the southern and southwestern portions of Puerto Rico with catastrophic rainfall and flooding with hurricane-force conditions.

In the ARRL Puerto Rico Section, Public Information Coordinator (PIC) Angel L. Santana-Diaz, WP3GW, who lives in Trujillo Alto, reported a widespread blackout as the hurricane made landfall on the island. Still, he explained, there were ham radio repeaters that remained on the air with amateurs sharing reports of damage, including downed trees and power poles, and roofs ripped from homes.

In advance of the hurricane, the Radio Society of Bermuda activated their Emergency Measures Organization (EMO) on Wednesday, September 21, at 1:43 PM ET and plans to have 14 active amateurs monitoring the hurricane network. Plans are to use local repeaters, unless there’s a power loss, then they’ll switch to simplex. They’re currently monitoring 14.283 MHz and will continue to monitor that frequency.

Thanks to the ARRL for those notes.

After Bermuda, the hurricane was forecast to head north off the coast of the U.S., and strike Nova Scotia yesterday afternoon. I can’t remember having heard of a Caribbean hurricane making it to Canada before.

There is also an early alert for Tropical Cyclone NORU, travelling due west in the China Sea, and threatening, in order, Philippines, China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, with winds of 120km/h or higher threatening a population of at least two and a quarter million.

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs has said that disaster management teams remained on high alert following a warning of disruptive snow in the province this past week.

MEC Sihle Zikalala said disaster management teams continued to monitor the inclement weather conditions affecting large parts of KZN. He said that on Tuesday morning, the South African Weather Service issued a weather warning for disruptive snow in areas under the Harry Gwala and uThukela districts.

The snow was expected to lead to icy roads which could lead to traffic disruptions and closure of local routes.

“Residents in the affected areas are urged to continue to monitor the weather conditions and not embark on any unnecessary trips as they risk entrapment should conditions deteriorate,” Zikalala said.

He said that disaster management teams would continue to monitor routes with plans in place to mobilise equipment to clear roads that were blocked by the snow, should the need arise. High ground in the Eastern Cape, Lesotho and the Drakensberg were decked with a blanket of white.

A couple of times each year, the City of Cape Town Disaster Risk Management agency runs a Koeberg Nuclear Accident Exercise, and this week on Thursday, such an event took place.

Any and every agency you can think of, which might become responsible to all living things in the Western Cape, if Koeberg were to threaten to melt down, was involved. A huge team of these people gathered at Goodwood Disaster Risk Management Centre, and a scenario of leakage of steam and loss of steam pressure in the three phases of energy capture from nuclear fission to turbine power generation was played out. The action was concertinaed into a morning, although such an accident would probably have taken two or three days to develop, and all the agencies were given a chance to apply their prepared relevant strategies.

Danie ZS1OSS and I attended as HAMNET volunteers, and Danie has written a very elegant report of the workings of the exercise. It is quite long, but too good to hack to pieces for this report, so I will post it separately in its entirety to the usual HAMNET internet sites for you to read.

Included will be a picture of HAMNET’s radio room at Goodwood Disaster Risk Management Centre, sponsored by the city of Cape Town, and with call sign ZS1DCC. (We have a smaller and less well-equipped radio room at the Provincial Emergency Management Centre at Tygerberg Hospital, with call sign ZS1DZ.)

Thanks very much for the report, Danie.

Tomorrow (Monday) night, an hour or so after midnight will see NASA’s special suicide spacecraft DART crash into the little moon called Dimorphos, of a binary asteroid, called Didymos.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the world’s first mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards, will impact its target asteroid—which poses no threat to Earth—at 1:14 a.m. CAT on Tuesday, Sept. 27.

DART’s target is the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet, Dimorphos. Launched in November 2021, the mission will see if intentionally crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is an effective way to change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future. This test will also show that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it in a way that can be measured using telescopes on Earth.

The plan is to watch the little moon critically with several telescopes worldwide, with a view to deriving its orbit, to see if the impact made any difference. It will be amazing if it does, won’t it?!

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.