so we ran a pretty involved simulated disaster exercise last Saturday, scenario was a major earthquake hitting the region, infrastructure down, hospitals overwhelmed, the usual. I've been doing ARES stuff for maybe four years now and I thought I had a pretty good handle on things but honestly this drill humbled me a little bit.

biggest thing I learned is that we assumed way too much about who would show up and with what equipment. two of our key operators didn't have their go-bags stocked the way they thought they did, one guy showed up with a dead HT battery and no spares, and we spent like the first 20 minutes just sorting out who had what capability. in a real event that 20 minutes could actually matter.

the net control piece was also rough early on. our primary NC operator did great but when we simulated him becoming unavailable (which, realistically, could happen) the backup had a hard time taking over the log format mid-exercise. we didn't drill that handoff enough clearly.

curious if anyone else has done similar exercises, tabletop or full field deployment sims. what's your group learned the hard way that changed how you prep? we're already talking about a follow-up drill focused specifically on the ICS forms and message handling but I'd love to hear what other groups have found useful.

yeah this hits close to home, we did something similar through our county ARES group about two years ago and the dead battery thing is SO common it's almost a running joke at this point except it really isn't funny when you think about why we're doing this. our EC basically instituted a rule after that drill where everyone has to do a comms check including battery verification before any activation, even for routine stuff, just to build the habit.

the ICS forms handoff problem you mentioned is a real one. we found that having a laminated quick reference card specifically for the message log format helped a lot for operators who don't use it regularly. muscle memory stuff. also we started doing 15-minute mini drills, like just net control handoffs, not a full exercise, just practice the one thing that keeps failing. that helped more than I expected honestly. the big multi-hour sims are important but sometimes drilling the one weak link is more efficient.

one thing nobody talks about enough in these exercises is the mental load on net control when traffic volume spikes. we simulated that by having a bunch of people all try to check in at once and our NC just kinda froze for a second. not a criticism of him, it just revealed something we hadn't thought about training for.

im pretty new to ARES, just joined a few months ago, and I havent been through a full drill yet but my EC mentioned we have one coming up in the spring. reading this is kind of making me nervous about showing up underprepared lol. whats the bare minimum someone in my position should have in a go-bag for something like this? i have my HT and a spare battery but thats about it honestly