This is taken from the Ottawa Sun newspaper and was forwarded to me in 
E-mail.
 All copyrights are the Ottawa Sun's.
 Posted for yor info only on what has been happening up here with amateur 
radio
during our ice storm emergency.
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January 18, 1998
"HAM RADIO LEGION THE PEOPLE'S VOICE"
 By JACKI LEROUX -- Ottawa Sun
 For more than a week,Marcel Gervais was a faceless voice on a walkie-talkie.
 But for the thousands of people stranded without power,telephone or heat 
during the ice storm,the amateur radio buff was much more than that -- he was
their very lifeline.
 Officials and politicians have been hailing the efforts of the hundreds of 
ham
radio volunteers like Gervais who banded together to form a communications 
network that helped link the storm relief mission from Carleton Place to 
Kemptville to Hawkesbury.
 Where telephone lines were down or emergency phones overloaded with calls,up 
to 150 communications experts were out there day and night dispatching 
information essential to the relief effort.
 And at the heart of the common frequency was Gervais,working daily from the 
communications headquarters at the main Cumberland Fire Hall from 7 a.m.
to 10 p.m.
 "Thanks to them, we had up-to-date information on the residents that were
affected," said Cumberland Mayor Brian Coburn. "(The relief effort) would 
have been much more difficult. It would have been less efficient."
 A ham radio operator since 1962, Gervais, 55, took to the airwaves looking 
for volunteers as soon as the crisis struck Eastern Ontario.
 "I went on the radio and said, 'There's going to be a crisis and we're going 
to need help,' " said Gervais, a retired Canadian Airlines employee.
 About 20 people came forward at first, but at the peak of the emergency 
there were up to 150 operators set up in emergency shelters and on the roads 
helping to organize supply transfers or anything else that needed to be done.
 "We were averaging 2,000 to 2,500 contacts in a 24-hour period," said 
Gervais.
"You can train all your life for an emergency, but it never compares to the 
real thing," he said. "You fly by the seat of your pants and do what has to 
get done. We were the liaison between all the people out there doing the 
actual work. We were the unseen people putting it all together."
 "The actual hero is not me. It's the volunteers that have been going out in
the field. If you need them, they're there," he said.
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