Radio Resource
International
Quarter 3 1998
South Africa's southwestern coast suffered from violent floods in April. The storms ravaged houses, bridges and railway lines near the ocean. Emergency rescue efforts initialy were hindered by poor communications, resulting in part from dead batteries after a few hours into the emergency; workers in the field were without adequate radio contact.
Graeme Wells, director of Advanced Charger Technology (ACT) Pty. Ltd. of Cape Town, South Africa, and Douwe Damstra, ACT marketing analyst, traveled three and a half hours to the emergency crisis center with three ACTivator VI chargers. "We saw the flooding disaster on the Friday evening news and wanted to help where we could," says Wells. "We called and were informed by the head of the rescue effort that they were pulling their hair out with battery problems. In fact, they did not have any radios operational when we called."
The center was using trickle chargers, which were not quick enough to keep radios in constant service. In a little more than an hour, all batteries for radios at the center were fully charged using the ACT chargers, according to Damstra. Rescue workers traveled to the center during the night to charge their batteries.
"They called everyone in the field to come in and charge their radios as soon as possible," says Damstra. "There were no more masses of wires, drop-in chargers or power packs."
"Because of the nature of this disaster, people were busy on the radio almost every second, and when the radios went down, I brought in the normal chargers, which helped a little," comments Clive MacKay, Mossel Bay municipality fire chief, who was in charge of the crisis center. "But when the ACT system arrived, it helped us in a big way."
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