With everything going on due to the COVID-19 outbreak, I thought it prudent to post some information about a report that we use often in MARS during emergency situations and has been requested recently during our regional nets. When requested, MARS members are to attempt to obtain the specified information from specific sources including; commercial broadcasts, EAS/IPAWS alerts, government officials (other than EAS/IPAWS), or Amateur Radio operators.

The County Status Report follows a very specific format and attempts to identify the status of infrastructure and critical services within the specified location. The report is formatted as follows:

FIPS#:
Date/Time(UTC): DDHHMM
Power: Y (Yes, fully functional), R (rolling blackout/planned outages), P (partial blackout, unplanned), B (brownout, unplanned), N (No, complete blackout, unplanned)
Water: Y (yes, fully functional), P (partial, unplanned interruption in parts of county), C (contaminated, water service is available but should not be used), N (No, complete unplanned interruption)
Sanitation: Y (yes, fully functional), P (Partial, unplanned interruption in parts of the county), N (complete, unplanned interruption)
Medical: Y (Yes, fully functional staffed hospitals with all levels of care available), P ( partial, unplanned decrease in capacity due to loss of facilities), R (Partial, unplanned decrease in capacity due to loss of personnel), F (Full, facilities are at maximum capacity and cannot handle additional patients), N (No, facilities are unusable due to loss of personnel or infrastructure)
Communications: Y (Yes, fully functional government and commercial communications), P (Partial, commercial communications out but civil government communications are operational), N ( No, complete loss of commercial and government communications)
Transportation: Y (Yes, fully functioning mass transit, roads and rail systems), P (Partial, unplanned interruption of service or loss of roads/rail systems in parts of county), N (No, complete loss of mass transit systems, roads remain available except for those damaged)
Source: C (Commercial broadcast), E (EAS/IPAWS government broadcast), G (Civil government or public officials other than EAS/IPAWS such as those from an EOC), A (Amateur, information originated from amateur operator)
Remarks: (Can include additional details not covered elsewhere such as school closures, curfews, etc)

These reports are used by the DoD on other government agencies that MARS serves such as FEMA and Homeland Security in determining the allocations of resources and personnel deployed to specific areas during an emergency. 

As of this morning, there are NO formal requests for this information from MARS HQ, however the information was requested by our Wing Staff officers both as training and to ensure the latest information was available if/when HQ tasks us with gathering this information.  As with many other pieces of information MARS requests, the local amateur community is a valuable partner and source of information.  We should all be familiar with the types of information that MARS often requests, such as the County Status Report.  

There are other specific RI's (Request for Information), that MARS tasks to its members both during exercises and declared emergencies such as weather data (usually METAR), Power information (such as utility company, voltage/frequency information), Communications Status (landline, cell, internet, etc.).  Since this particular information is most pertinent to the current emergency, I figured it would be good to start with this.  Going forward, I will post other types of RI's that MARS engages with the amateur community to obtain.