There is no mutual aid asked for or given by hams in the state of Pennsylvania.
In rural Pennsylvania most everything emergency related is done by the volunteer firemen and the REACT people.
The REACT people would make good hams, but they sometimes get paid to do civic functions such as bicycle races, marathons, activities in the park, parking cars at the high school for football games.
Because they have a pecuniary interest they cannot use amateur radio, not even simplex when they are being paid, and several of the locals all had their license when there was a incentive license and code requirement - they couldn't pass the code to get the upgrade and were stuck at the Novice level.
Since there was no VE test sessions in my area, there was no way for them to upgrade other then travel 20 - 50 miles one way to take the test.
When there is a disaster, the local ARES group has been turned away and the big boys from Pittsburgh were brought up to handle the communications locally.
The county will NOT let the local hams use their communications trailer - since the county emergency coordinator is a volunteer fireman and the trailer is parked at his fire station.
Other counties are given the use of the trailer for special events and have access to the county Emergency Operations Center.
The local group - Quad County am radi club was thrown out of the Clearfield EOC. So there is no local mutual aid or desire to work with the clubs.
The local club signed a letter with the American Red Cross and then when there was a flood - twice now in the last two years, they were not called to assist. The government people says that as long as the county radio system and the cell towers still works, they don't need ARES or RACES.
Because no one practices - when there is a real emergency, no one knows what to do or even if they can use their handheld to talk simplex back to the EOC - which they cannot without the aid of the repeaters.
The repeaters were taken over by the WAN people - wide area network, so the chatter on the repeater can be anyone from anywhere in the world - voip. The last disaster we had, there was some bung hole from the Pocono's asking how things were going and jamming up emergency communications.
It was just some lonely bung hole with a handheld that could hit his one linked repeater that was looking for someone to talk to and didn't understand that we had a bad storm and didn't have time to talk to him.
Hurricane Sandy knocked out power to most of the area for 10 days and blew down many trees and knocked out landline telephone communications.
I did not have a working landline for 14 days!
Ham radio was the easiest way for us to communicate and call for help when needed. The gas station could not pump gas - because they had no electric, the telephone company could not get reports of outages - because the telephones did not work and they did not maintain the lines. The state police could not use their Open Sky because their internet wouldn't work.
Their Intranet did work, it was RF linked, but there was many outages due to poles being knocked over and trees knocking the antenna's off the poles.
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