so we finally got enough people together to run a proper tabletop exercise for our county ARES group. we've been talking about doing one for like two years and it finally happened. the scenario was a prolonged power outage during a winter storm, EOC is up and running, shelters need net check-ins, the usual kind of thing.

what surprised me honestly was how quickly things broke down in ways that had nothing to do with radio. like we had three people who didn't know who they were supposed to report to, and one guy kept going net on a frequency we hadn't pre-coordinated with the county. the radios all worked fine. it was the procedural stuff that got messy.

we also realized our ICS forms training is... not great. half the group had never filled out an ICS 213 under any kind of time pressure and it showed. i think we're so focused on whether our gear works that we forget the whole point is to pass information clearly to people who need it.

anyway if anyone else has done these exercises I'd love to hear what surprised you or what lessons you took away. especially curious if anyone has done a full-scale activation vs just tabletop and what the difference felt like.

yeah this is pretty much exactly what we found when we did ours a few years back. the radio part is almost never the problem — its everything around it. who has what authority, how does traffic flow up to the served agency, does the EC actually have a working relationship with the emergency manager or did they just exchange emails once in 2019.

the ICS forms thing is real. we made everyone practice filling out a 213 during a net and people who'd been licensed for 20 years were fumbling around. now we try to incorporate it into every exercise even if its just one or two forms so it becomes muscle memory. also worth doing a go-kit audit during the exercise — have people actually open their kits and confirm they have what they think they have. you'd be amazed what gets borrowed and not returned or what batteries went dead sitting in a bag.

full activation versus tabletop is a big jump. the tabletop is great for finding the procedural gaps like you found, but nothing really prepares you for the fatigue and the noise and the weird interpersonal stuff that happens when people are stressed and tired. if you can do an overnight exercise even just six or eight hours you'll learn a ton more. we did one at an actual shelter a couple winters ago and it was eye opening in ways that are hard to describe.

this is making me think I should actually join our local ARES group. ive got my general and some decent HF gear but I always assumed emcomm was kind of just... showing up with a radio. sounds like there's a lot more to it than that. the ICS stuff especially, I dont think I know any of that.