Hill Country Health and Wellness Center fulfills many functions in our service area; one of these is serving as a communication center in the event of an emergency, such as a wildland fire.  Cell phone towers can become overwhelmed with traffic while telephone and power lines may be destroyed. During Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, amateur radio operators were the only people who could communicate from within these disaster areas for several days, and much of the initial relief and rescue effort was coordinated by amateur radio operators.

As a result, the Department of Homeland Security helped supply a number of organizations, such as Hill Country, with amateur radios. We now have two 2-meter radios: one voice, and one packet radio. This will enable us to talk to other medical facilities, fire departments, SHASCOM, Red Cross, and fairgrounds where incident command centers are organized during emergencies—even under complete power and telephone loss. Our voice radio can communicate as far as north Sacramento, and packet messages can be sent even farther. The packet radio operates even when the clinic is closed.

This equipment also allows Hill Country Clinic to participate in countywide emergency response drills staged by STARES (Shasta Tehama Amateur Radio Emergency Service). This not only provides Hill Country a direct link during real emergencies, it also allows us to coordinate with other medical facilities in our area for training, a crucial part of preparedness. Radio operators must be certified for training purposes, but in an actual emergency, anyone can use the radio so that communication is maintained at all times.

Our helicopter pad is another critical piece of our emergency preparedness facilities. In addition to allowing us to fly seriously injured or critically ill patients to the nearest full-service hospitals and emergency rooms, this pad would allow us to serve as an important node for temporary command posts during emergencies.