Dallas hamsexual Victor Xray posted this gem of a tragedy to the forums earlier today:

911 Calls Released After Family Electrocuted
“Melville Braham, 55, his wife Anna, 49, and their 15-year-old son, Anthony, were trying to put up a new amateur radio antenna when it fell onto power lines. The accident happened at Melville’s mother’s house on Alaska Avenue.

The Brahams had amateur radio antennas in their yards. They were trying to put a second one up when the accident happened. Eyewitness News learned that family members couldn’t get near them to help. Melville’s mother did have an amateur radio license.

‘They were trying to put up an antenna in the backyard and my brother and mom and my dad were holding it down and, um, something happened and something went off and they got electrocuted and they are all laying on the ground,’ daughter Melissa Braham told the 911 operator.”

The worst thing about this is that it was absolutely preventable. I personally don’t like insulting the intelligence of my readers by stating the obvious, bust apparently the ham world at large needs to be reminded of a few Antenna 101 basics.

1.) STAY AWAY FROM POWER LINES. There is a very simple formula you use here: if the height-to-tip of your antenna structure exceeds the shortest ground distance to the nearest power line, don’t do it. Period. Shorten your antenna structure, move forther away from the power lines, or stick to handhelds and indoor antennas.

2.) DON’T DO ANTENNA WORK AT NIGHT OR IN INCLEMENT WEATHER. When the sun goes down, it’s time to call it quits for the day. If there’s a stiff breeze or clouds looming on the horizon, put it down and wait for better conditions. You can’t be a part of EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS or SAVING THE WORLD THROUGH HAMMING if you’re recovering from electrocution or being struck by lightning (if you’re even lucky enough to get a shot at recovery.)

3.) KNOW THE LIMITS AND REQUIREMENTS OF YOUR SUPPORTING STRUCTURE. From the article pictures (and from the mouth of the reporter), it appears that the family was attempting to use a Buddipole contraption of at least 40 feet or greater, un-guyed and not set in the ground. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Don’t try to stand up a fully-extended mast from the ground.. they’re not meant to do that. And don’t go top-heavy with your antennas, either. A Rohn zip-pole was not meant to support an Andrew Decibel DB420 dipole array fully extended, to use an example.

4.) USE COMMON SENSE. In ham radio as in many other aspects of life, if it seems like a bad idea, don’t do it. If you don’t know what you’re doing or feel uncertain as to your capabilities, seek experienced help.

Hopefully we can all learn a lesson from this. And maybe if you’re sitting there and reading this and thinking “gee, what a bunch of idiots, I would never do that” then you especially need to give it some thought.

And last but not least, don’t do it like this guy.

We’ve all seen or read it at some point. In the aftermath of a major disaster, “news articles” and “press releases” get published touting the role of Amateur Radio as the only means of communication left working and describing its role in aiding disaster recovery and emergency management, often with varying degrees of embellishment. Like many of you who go years or decades, or maybe even your entire lives without experiencing such an event, I read these stories from the perspective of an outsider: skeptical, maybe even a little jaded, but still believing that at their core there was some small nugget of truth where Amateur Radio did, in fact, provide needed and appreciated communications relief “when all else failed.” Well, on 12 September 2008 and in the ensuing weeks I got to experience it up close and personal in the form of Hurricane Ike.

Here is what I saw.

I live in the city of Pasadena, Texas, a suburb of 150,000 people on the southeast side of Houston. Our emergency services operate on the Harris County Regional Radio Network, a 24-site 800 MHz Motorola Smartzone trunked system. The city also hosts its own amateur radio volunteer group, the Pasadena Emergency Communications Group, under the direct management of the city’s OEM. While they were active before, during and after the storm, they were not called upon to provide fill-in communications for emergency services when the storm knocked the two 800 MHz sites closest to this area off-line, nor were they tapped in the days after when the two sites continued to go on- and off-line and in and out of Site Trunking mode and despite the fact that both of the City-owned amateur repeaters never went off-line at any point during or after the storm.

More telling, however, was an incident that happened to me personally on the Thursday after the storm passed. On that day, the electrical service restoral crews re-energized the portion of the grid servicing my neighborhood but without performing any repairs or tree removal. As you can imagine, this sparked a number of fires.  One such fire ignited in the back yard of one of my elderly neighbors, who was staying by herself. Not having any cellular service (Nextel was weak in my immediate area until at least two weeks after the storm had pased), I put out two emergency calls on the local 2-meter machine. I finally raised an elderly ham, who:

-did not identify himself.

-did not want to call 911 because he believed the situation did not qualify as an emergency.

-basically gave up after he got no answer at the fire department’s non-emergency number.

By this time I had flagged down a passing police officer, and he radioed it in. While the event did end up not causing any significant structural damage, the seeming callousness of this anonymous OF ham left me dumbstruck.
I should also mention that despite this, amateur radio volunteers did provide a service for FEMA relaying information from the many food-and-water points of distribution (PODs) in Harris County back to their staging area via 2-meter simplex and various repeaters. I’m sure there were also other instances of Amateur Radio providing legitimate assistance in the greater Houston-Galveston area (it’s pretty big, and I didn’t personally stray too far from home for several weeks after the storm.) But overall, the activity in my area sure as hell wasn’t indicative of ARRL’s “when all else fails” party line.