Amateur radio received positive publicity in today’s Sunday Globe article entitled, “Have We Learned Anything? What the Blizzard of 1978 has taught us about emergency preparedness in Massachusetts.”
The City & Region front-page story by Boston Globe staff writer Peter J. Howe included the following text:
“In 1978, the [Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency] leaned heavily on amateur ham radio operators and citizens-band radio owners to share information. ‘There were people holed up in places that nobody knew about,’ [Peter] Judge [spokesman for MEMA] said, including makeshift shelters that rapidly ran out of food.
“Today, the agency still enlists 30,000 ham radio operators in a kind of emergency-information militia, but has sophisticated Web-based conferencing and information-sharing systems linking hundreds of state and local governmental agencies.”