When Hurricane Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005, near Buras, Louisiana, as a Category 3 storm with winds near 125 miles per hour, it knocked out power, telephones and much of the Gulf Coast's ordinary communications. In Hancock County, Mississippi, the county had lost contact with the outside world except through amateur radio operators, who stepped in as 911 dispatchers and relayed messages in and out. It was dramatic, but it was not improvised from nothing. That morning was the product of seventy years of hams deciding, long before a disaster, who would show up, on what frequency, and for whom.
The organizing began in 1935, when the ARRL used the September issue of QST to invite amateurs interested in emergency work to register with League headquarters. The early idea, carried forward by the Amateur Radio Emergency Corps, was simple and local: know your civic officials, offer your station before it is needed, and aim to have a prepared operator in every community. The first local emergency coordinators followed in 1937. Over time that corps evolved into today's Amateur Radio Emergency Service, known as ARES, a volunteer program in which any licensed amateur with a sincere interest in public service can take part.
World War II taught a harder lesson. When the United States entered the war, regular amateur operation was silenced, and the War Emergency Radio Service had to be built from scratch for civil defense in 1942, a process that took about six months. After the war, the ARRL and the Army's Office of Civil Defense helped shape a standby answer: the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service, or RACES, whose rules took effect on August 15, 1952, and now live in Part 97.407. RACES was designed so enrolled operators, pre-registered with state or local emergency management, could keep serving their government agencies if the President ever silenced the regular amateur service again. That wartime switch has never been thrown, but RACES groups are still activated by emergency managers for disasters closer to home.
The value of being ready showed again on March 27, 1964, when a magnitude 9.2 earthquake, the largest recorded in North America, shattered south-central Alaska. Telephone links failed, and amateurs provided some of the first word out, including the report that Kodiak had survived, and for a time they were the only reliable link between Alaska and the Lower 48. A federal assessment of the disaster called amateur radio indispensable, largely because in Alaska it was already part of everyday life, not a system invented in the crisis.
Katrina, four decades later, was the same story at national scale. More than a thousand ARES volunteers came to the Gulf Coast and provided communications for the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and government agencies, staffing hospitals, shelters and emergency operations centers and passing health and welfare traffic by voice and by digital Winlink links. ARES and RACES are cousins, not twins: ARES volunteers serve a broad range of agencies, while RACES operators work directly under the emergency management authority that activates them. Together they carry one of the oldest promises in amateur radio: when everything else stops working, somebody is already on the air.