so we finally got our county ARES group together for a tabletop/actual-radio exercise last saturday. been trying to coordinate this for like 4 months because everyones schedules never line up. anyway we did a simulated scenario where a major ice storm had knocked out power to about 60% of the county, cell towers were down or overloaded, and the EOC needed served agency welfare checks relayed through amateur radio.

honestly the biggest thing that tripped us up wasnt the radio stuff at all. it was message handling. people were improvising their own formats, some were using ICS 213 forms some werent, and it created this bottleneck at net control where Dave (our NCS for the drill) was basically transcribing everything in real time and falling behind. by like the second hour he was pretty frazzled. we had three mobiles deployed, two portables, and the EOC station running and in theory that should have been plenty but the message flow just wasnt organized.

we also discovered that one of our members had never actually sent a formal radiogram before. like ever. and he's been licensed for 9 years. no judgement at all but it highlighted how many of us have drifted away from traffic handling basics and just kind of assumed we knew what we were doing.

anyway wondering if others have run drills recently and what your biggest surprises or facepalm moments were. feels like we can always improve but its hard to know where to start sometimes.

yeah message handling is almost always the thing that falls apart, at least in every exercise ive been part of. everyone practices the radio part, getting signal reports, making contact, whatever — but the actual information management side gets treated like an afterthought until suddenly youre in the middle of a real activation and someone hands you a handwritten note on a napkin and says relay this to the EOC.

we had a similar situation a couple years back during a Skywarn activation that turned into more than just weather spotting. a bad storm rolled through and actually caused some infrastructure damage and suddenly we were getting requests for real welfare check relays. we werent ready for the volume and had two people trying to log everything in a notebook while also operating, it was a mess. after that we started dedicating at least one person at every deployment specifically to logging and message handling, not touching the radio at all. made a huge difference. also started doing monthly traffic nets just to keep the ICS form muscle memory alive. its boring but it works.

the 9-year licensee thing doesnt surprise me at all by the way. a lot of folks get their ticket to do DX or satellites or whatever and the traffic handling stuff just never comes up in their normal operating. drills are really the only way to find those gaps before it matters.

this is making me think i should actually push our club to do something like this. we talk about being prepared but i dont think weve ever actually simulated anything beyond like a basic net check-in. how did you get people motivated to show up on a saturday for a drill? thats always the hard part around here, everyone says theyre interested but then something comes up.