Monday Profile
Newcastle Herald
Monday March 16, 1998
BEFORE 1977, Evan Longworth and Ron Meehan would have been outlaws.
Now they are struggling to keep their service alive ? along with its hard-won legitimacy and respect.
Illegal Citizen's Band (CB) radio soared to popularity in the 1970s, spurred by success in America, movies like Convoy and Smokey and the Bandit.
But fear of radios being used to evade the law and concern by Ham radio operators led to a government crackdown that included raids, confiscations and an underground network.
After massive protests, including a 16km-long convoy of CB enthusiasts in Canberra, the radios were legalised.
A lot of that success had to do with the importance of the medium for emergency services.
And that's what Evan Longworth and Ron Meehan ? leaders of Newcastle's Citizens Radio Emergency Service Teams (CREST) ? are trying to save.
In some ways, the two men feel like relics from a bygone era that also included disco music, platform shoes and bell-bottom jeans.
For aside from the truckies, the number of people who use CB radios has dramatically declined since its hey day, when up to 15,000 users were on the air in the Newcastle area.
Now there are only a few hundred.
In CREST, there are 26 Newcastle members providing a valuable emergency service that is under-used but has proven itself time and time again when phone lines were jammed or unavailable ? in the 1989 earthquake, the 1994 bushfires, during motor vehicle accidents and bush rescues.
`We're the only organisation that can talk directly to the motoring public,' Mr Meehan, the group's operations director, said.
The members, fully trained in professional radio communications protocol, broadcast severe weather warnings to motorists, advise of stolen vehicles, road closures and fires. And someone from CREST is monitoring the emergency channel 24 hours a day to field calls for help.
Those calls are also getting more infrequent as the `blasted' mobile phone takes over, Mr Longworth ? the organisation's longest serving member ? said.
In 1977, for example, the Northpoint Base in Sydney was taking more than 1500 calls per month. In Newcastle in 1991-92, members handled 225 calls and 197 referrals to emergency services.
Today, they might get 10 to 20 calls a month.
`But if we even save one life, all those hours of listening are worth it,' Mr Meehan said.
The stories are countless.
There was the truck driver who contacted CREST after a head-on collision with a car, talking on his radio while the car's driver lay bleeding, stuck halfway through his truck's windscreen. Thanks to quick notification through CREST, the man lived. There was the hang glider who hung himself up on the side of a cliff and called for help through his portable CB.
There was the man whose vehicle stalled on a railway line and asked CREST to ring for the train to stop.
And there was Mr Meehan's very first emergency call: from a yacht stuck on a reef with adults and children aboard. Picking up a faint and fading broadcast, he telephoned authorities, who rescued the family.
But someone else who had been listening to the broadcast stole the yacht.
Mr Longworth and Mr Meehan, who have been close friends for 14 years, met each other through the radio.
In 1984, Mr Meehan was out fishing in a remote Barrington Tops location with a CB radio he had borrowed, but never used before.
`I got on the emergency channel by mistake and started chatting and this bloke jumped on me,' he said, pointed across the table at Mr Longworth.
But he's been hooked on CB ever since.
Mr Longworth joined CREST in 1978 after seeing a horrendous car accident near Muswellbrook.
`I remember thinking that if I had one of those new-fangled CB radios, I could get people out there faster.'
Instead, he had to drive into town to alert authorities.
For both men, the radio has become a constant companion and a worthwhile diversion since they left work on compensation many years ago.
Mr Meehan, a fitting machinist seriously injured his back in 1993. Mr Longworth, a mail truck driver, was smashed up in a vehicle accident in 1976.
`This gives me something to do,' Mr Meehan said. `A lot of the people with CBs are disabled or homebound.'
Aside from emergencies, members of CREST take their mobile van on the road to assist in community and charitable events such as yesterday's `Loop the Lake' bike ride in Lake Macquarie, Australia Day activities and last year's Newcastle bicentenary events ? providing essential communications for safety, crowd control and overall coordination.
Tax-deductable donations in exchange for these services are the group's prime source of fundraising.
Last week, they assisted the Native Animal Trust Fund in rescuing koalas from burnt out areas around the Tomago water works ? just as they did after the fires of 1994, when they coordinated the movements of 400 people through burnt-out bush.
And there is also the social side of owning a CB, chatting to people on the other side of the town or the other side of the world (depending on atmospheric `skip' conditions). MR Longworth met his girlfriend through the organisation and last year had his first face-to-face meeting with another woman in Queensland with whom he'd talked by radio for the past 18 years.
The statewide organisation, including 128 members, had a reunion meeting in Newcastle on March 7 and has become very much like a family that has seen each member through various stages of life.
For the members of CREST have learned that communication is one of the very foundations of a healthy society.
`Since TV, people have stopped talking to each other,' Mr Longworth said.
`With CB radio, you can learn to talk again.'
© 1998 Newcastle Herald