so we ran a simulated disaster exercise with our local ARES group this past weekend, basically a scenario where a major flood had knocked out all commercial infrastructure in the county and we had to handle welfare traffic and coordinate with the served agencies. i've been licensed about 6 years and done a handful of these but this one was different because the county EOC actually participated and had real staff there, not just our ham guys pretending to be them.

what caught me completely off guard was how bad i was at translating what the net control was asking for into something the EOC staff could actually understand. like i knew exactly what was going on on the radio side but when the emergency manager walked over and asked me to explain the situation i kind of stumbled. nobody ever really drills that part i guess.

also we had a guy show up with a go-kit that looked amazing, like seriously impressive pelican case setup, but his battery situation was a mess and he was basically dead in the water after about 4 hours. all the fancy gear in the world doesnt help if you havent thought through your power budget.

anybody have stories from their own exercises or real events? especially curious if others have run into the communication gap between ham operators and the agency staff they're supposed to be supporting. feels like that's where a lot of groups are weak and we dont talk about it enough.

yeah that translation problem is really real. i went through the same thing during a Red Cross shelter support exercise maybe three years ago now. you spend all this time getting good at radio procedure and then the moment a non-ham asks you a simple question you kind of blank because your brain is still half in radio mode. our group started doing a thing where one person is designated strictly as the liaison and they dont touch the radio at all, they just sit with the agency staff and translate. made a huge difference honestly.

the power thing comes up every single time in our after-action reviews. every time. somebody always underestimates how long they'll actually be deployed. i run two 100ah LiFePO4 batteries now and i still make sure i know where i can recharge if it goes long. the fancy case stuff is great but if you havent done the math on your actual draw over 12 or 24 hours you're just guessing.

sounds like a good exercise though, having real EOC staff there is pretty rare from what i've seen, most groups just simulate the whole thing which only gets you so far.

this is actually really helpful to read because our group is trying to plan our first real tabletop exercise and i wasnt sure what scenarios to use. the flood thing sounds pretty realistic for our area too. did you guys script the whole thing out in advance or did someone just kind of throw curveballs as it went along?

im still pretty new to all the ARES stuff, only just got my general a few months ago, so i dont really know how these things are typically structured. do most groups write up a formal scenario document or is it more informal than that