so our county ARES group finally did a proper tabletop simulation last saturday and i wanted to share some of what happened because i think other groups could learn from it. the scenario was a prolonged power outage after a major ice storm, something like 72+ hours, with the EOC needing welfare check traffic from outlying areas and hospitals needing to relay patient info securely.

the biggest thing we discovered almost immediately was that like half our operators didnt actually know the net control procedures as well as they thought. when we introduced a simulated HF skip condition that cut out our primary frequency we had a lot of confusion about who was supposed to announce the move to the alternate and nobody could find the laminated frequency card that was supposed to be in the go kit. turns out it was there but buried under a rain poncho and a bag of cliff bars.

we also found out that two of our members had let their FEMA IS-100 and IS-700 certifications lapse which matters when you're trying to work alongside actual served agencies. not the end of the world but something to fix before a real event obviously.

on the positive side our digital operators on winlink did really well, the backup path through the RMS relay held up and we got simulated health and welfare traffic flowing within about 20 minutes of the exercise start which was honestly better than i expected. the new guys especially surprised me, one of them had only been licensed maybe 8 months and he just quietly set up his station and started processing messages while the rest of us were still arguing about net control.

anyway curious if other groups do these regularly and what kinds of scenarios have been most useful for finding gaps in your plans. we're thinking about doing a full field deployment exercise in the spring but i want to make sure we actually fix the tabletop stuff first.

this sounds like a really well run exercise honestly, the fact that things went wrong is kind of the whole point right. we did something similar about two years ago and our biggest failure was nobody had tested the go kit batteries in like six months. showed up to the EOC with three operators and not a single radio that would hold a charge for more than an hour. embarrassing doesnt even cover it.

the certification thing is real too. our served agency liaison got pretty serious about ICS credentials after one of our guys showed up to an actual activation and couldnt get badged in because his paperwork wasnt current. now we track it on a shared spreadsheet and somebody sends reminders every january. not glamorous but it works.

for scenarios i'd say the most valuable ones we've done involved communications going partially down rather than completely down. total failure is easy in a way because everyone knows nothing works. partial failure where you have to figure out whats working and route around whats not, thats where the real skills show up.

yeah the frequency card thing is such a classic problem lol. we solved that by just taping a laminated copy to the inside lid of the main go kit case. still gets ignored sometimes but at least its findable now.

im kind of new to all this ARES stuff, only joined the group earlier this year, and the tabletop exercises have been the most useful thing for me by far. reading the EOP is one thing but actually running through a scenario where someone is throwing curveballs at you is totally different. i had no idea how much i didnt know until the first one we did.