so we finally got our act together and ran a full simulated emergency exercise for the county last Saturday. scenario was a major flood event cutting off the eastern part of the county, no cell service, main EOC needs to coordinate with three shelter sites and the hospital. we had about 14 operators show up which was honestly better turnout than i expected.

the short version is that it went... okay. not great, not terrible. the stuff that fell apart was mostly the stuff we assumed would just work. like we had two guys show up with radios they hadnt touched in six months and the memories were all messed up from some firmware update. one of the shelter sites couldnt hear the EOC net control at all because turns out the repeater we planned to use had a PL tone change nobody told the newer members about. we lost probably 45 minutes just sorting that out in a simulated scenario which in a real event would have been catastrophic.

the thing that actually went well was the ICS paperwork flow once we got comms stable. the guy we have doing our training has been really pushing the ICS 213 forms and it showed, the message traffic was way cleaner than our last drill two years ago.

curious if other groups have found good ways to stress test their frequency plans before an actual activation. we're thinking about doing a shorter tabletop exercise before the next full drill to work out the coordination stuff on paper first.

yeah the PL tone thing gets people every single time, you'd think after all these years groups would have a better system for pushing out repeater changes but it never seems to happen. our group had almost the exact same issue during a drill a few years back, except it was the input frequency on our backup simplex channel being wrong in like half the members' radios.

the tabletop idea is solid. we started doing those before every full exercise and it really does help surface the dumb stuff early. doesnt have to be fancy, we just get 6-8 people around a table with a map and a scenario sheet and basically talk through what happens if X goes wrong. the questions that come up in those sessions always surprise me. someone always asks something like 'wait who actually has the key to the trailer' and suddenly you realize nobody has written that down anywhere.

one thing we added to our drills that helped a lot was a dedicated 'inject coordinator' whose whole job during the exercise is to throw curveballs at the team. radio fails, operator has to leave, shelter site reports their count doubled unexpectedly. keeps people from getting too comfortable and actually tests whether your backup plans are real plans or just words on a document.

this is actually really helpful to read, im still pretty new to ARES stuff and honestly was a little intimidated going into our first activation-level drill next month. good to know even experienced groups hit snags with the basics. makes me feel better about not having everything memorized yet haha

question though — how do you handle operators who show up and are kind of out of practice? do you pair them with someone or just let them figure it out during the drill so they know what to work on?