so we ran a simulated disaster exercise saturday, coordinated with the county emergency manager and a couple of the local hospitals. i've been doing ARES stuff for maybe four years now and honestly thought i had a pretty good handle on things but this drill really humbled me a bit.

the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off the eastern part of the county — roads out, cell towers down, that kind of thing. we had operators at the EOC, two shelter locations, and a couple of us doing mobile work trying to relay between nets. sounded solid on paper.

what actually happened was kind of a mess in the best possible way. first thing that fell apart was message traffic handling. we're all decent at voice but the minute the EC asked us to start passing formal written traffic the whole thing slowed way down. people fumbling with ICS-213 forms, not sure who holds net control when the primary goes quiet, one guy at the shelter had the wrong simplex frequency written down entirely. nothing catastrophic but in a real event some of that could actually matter.

the thing that stuck with me most was how much we all assumed everyone else knew the plan. like we had a written plan but clearly not everyone had actually read it. anyway curious if others have run into similar stuff in their drills or activations and what you did about it. did you change how you train or just keep drilling until it sticks?

yeah this sounds really familiar honestly. we had almost the exact same issue come up during a simulated earthquake scenario we ran two winters ago — the ICS forms thing especially. what ended up helping us was doing a dedicated traffic handling night at our regular club meeting, just passing practice messages back and forth on a local repeater for like an hour. nothing fancy but people got more comfortable with the format without the pressure of a full drill on top of it.

the frequency mix-up thing is a real problem and i dont think theres a perfect solution. we now hand out a laminated card with the primary, secondary and tertiary freqs plus the simplex fallback and we ask people to put it in their go bag. some still show up with outdated ones but its better than it was. also the assumption problem — man that one is hard to fix. we started doing a short verbal briefing right before exercises start just to make sure everyone at least heard the same thing at the same time even if the written plan wasnt read. helps a little.

im pretty new to all this, just got my general last spring and just joined the local ARES group so i havent been in a full drill yet but reading this is actually really useful to know what to expect. i kind of assumed the experienced operators would just have everything handled and i'd be following along. maybe thats not quite how it works haha. is there stuff a newer person can do to actually be useful in these drills or is it mostly just watch and learn the first time?