so we finally got our county ARES group together for a full scale simulated disaster exercise last saturday. the scenario was a major ice storm knocking out power across three counties and we were supposed to coordinate with the county EOC and a couple of the Red Cross shelters. on paper it looked pretty solid, we had the net control station set up at the EOC, we had operators at two shelters and a couple of mobile units roaming around acting as relay points because the terrain here is rough and simplex coverage is just not great.

what i was not prepared for was how fast everything fell apart once we introduced the first inject -- which was basically a message saying one of the shelter operators had to leave because of a family emergency and we needed to find a replacement. that one little thing cascaded into like 45 minutes of confusion because nobody had a clear backup list and the net control operator (who has been doing this for years, solid guy) started trying to manage it all himself instead of delegating and the whole net just kind of stalled out.

also turns out our ICS message handling forms were printed on someones home printer and the ink smeared when they got a little damp, which is a dumb thing to not have thought about. and two of our HTs lost battery before noon which meant those operators were basically spectators.

debrief was really eye opening though. nobody got defensive which was great, everyone pretty much agreed we had identified some real gaps. the EC wants to do another drill in about 60 days to see if we fixed anything. has anyone else run into this kind of thing where the exercise reveals more problems than you expected? curious what other groups do for their after action reviews because ours was kind of loose and informal.

yeah this is basically every drill ever lol. the cascade failure from one inject is so common and honestly its kind of the whole point -- you want to find out where your single points of failure are before a real event. the backup operator list thing is something our group struggled with too, we now keep a laminated card at net control with at least two alternates for every position and their current contact info, and we actually verify the numbers are still good before each exercise.

the battery thing is a perennial problem. we started requiring anyone assigned to a shelter position to show up with a fully charged spare battery or a way to charge from a car. sounds obvious but you'd be amazed how many people show up with a half dead HT even knowing its a drill. for the real world we have a couple of battery boxes built up that can charge HTs off of a sealed lead acid but those take time to deploy.

for the after action review, we use a pretty simple format -- what went well, what didnt, and what do we change. we try to get input from every single participant not just the leadership because sometimes the guy running a shelter saw something that the EC never knew about. we also write it up and actually keep it on file so the next EC inherits that institutional knowledge and doesnt have to relearn everything from scratch. that last part took us a while to figure out honestly.

the ink smearing on the forms got me, we did the exact same thing at our drill two years ago. now we use cardstock and keep everything in zip lock bags in the go kits, cheap fix but it works. honestly your debrief sounds like it went better than some ive seen where people get defensive and nothing ever gets written down so the same mistakes happen again next time.