So we ran a simulated disaster exercise last Saturday, basically a scenario where a major storm had knocked out cell towers and the county EOC needed us to relay health and welfare traffic between two shelters and the hospital. Nothing we havent practiced on paper but actually doing it in real time was a totally different animal.

The thing that really caught me off guard was how fast message traffic backed up. We had maybe four or five operators handling incoming welfare messages and within like 40 minutes we had a pile of unacknowledged traffic just sitting there because nobody had established a clear net control rotation. Everyone kind of assumed someone else was tracking it. Classic thing you hear about but man it hits different when you watch it happen in front of you.

Also our backup frequency plan was basically nonexistent. We had the primary repeater and then... that was about it. When the drill organizers threw in a simulated repeater failure partway through, there was a solid five minutes of confusion before someone remembered we had a simplex fallback we'd agreed on like two years ago and nobody had written down anywhere useful.

Anyway im curious if others have run into similar stuff in their exercises. Whats the one thing that always falls apart for your group no matter how many times you practice it

yeah the message traffic backup thing is so real. we had almost the exact same issue during a county exercise a couple years back. what helped us was designating one person as basically just a traffic logger — not operating at all, just keeping a whiteboard of what was in queue, what was acknowledged, what was pending. sounds simple but it made a huge difference. that person also became the one who flagged when a message had been sitting too long without confirmation.

the repeater failure scenario is a good stress test too. we actually started building our simplex channels into a laminated card that goes in every go-kit now. not fancy but people actually use it. the stuff that isnt written down and physically present just doesnt get used under pressure, thats been my experience anyway.

This is only my second year with ARES so I haven't been through a ton of drills yet but the one we did in the spring had a moment where two people were transmitting on the net at the same time for like a full minute and nobody caught it right away. The net control that day was pretty experienced but she said afterward she had so much going on she genuinely didn't register the doubling for a while. Made me realize net control is way harder than it looks from the outside when you're just checking in.