so we ran a simulated disaster exercise Saturday, county-wide thing coordinated with the local ARES group and the emergency management office. I've done a few of these before but this one really opened my eyes to some gaps I didn't even know we had.

The scenario was a major ice storm taking out power and cell infrastructure across about a third of the county. We had net control set up at the EOC and were supposed to relay health and welfare traffic plus coordinate resource requests between the shelters. Sounds straightforward right? Except nobody had tested whether the repeater at the fire station would actually hold up on generator power for more than a couple hours. Spoiler: it didn't, and we had to scramble to get simplex working which honestly should have been our plan A anyway.

The other thing that caught me off guard was how much confusion there was about message formatting. Some guys were using ICS-213 forms, some were just passing informal traffic, and net control was struggling to log everything consistently. We talked about it afterward and most people agreed we need to standardize but nobody had really pushed for that before the exercise exposed it.

Anyone else run into this kind of thing? Curious what lessons other groups have come away with from their drills, especially around message handling and backup comms when your primary infrastructure fails.

yeah this is pretty much exactly what every ARES group discovers the first time they do a serious exercise instead of just a checkin drill. the repeater dependency thing is huge and it bites everybody at least once. our group actually made a rule after a similar exercise that all emcomm operators have to demonstrate they can work simplex out to their assigned shelter before they're considered ready for activation. sounds obvious but you'd be surprised how many people have never actually tried to hit a specific location on simplex and dont know if their mobile or HT can even do it.

the ICS forms thing is real too. we went through a whole Saturday session just going over 213 form handling and how to pass the information over voice without it turning into a mess. honestly the message handling piece is where a lot of technically solid operators fall apart because theyre used to ragchewing not structured traffic. Winlink helped us a lot once we got people trained on it but thats its own can of worms with everyone needing to be able to operate it under stress with no tutorial in front of them.

im kind of a newcomer to ARES stuff, just joined a few months ago, but we had a tabletop exercise at our club meeting last month and even that was really eye opening for me. we never actually keyed up but just talking through who does what and in what order made it obvious there were like three people who all thought they were supposed to be net control. nobody had actually written down who had primary vs backup roles.

I asked about getting involved in a real field exercise and somebody mentioned the county does one in the spring so i'm hoping to observe at least even if im not ready to take on a real assignment yet. reading your post makes me think i should probably work on simplex operating before then and maybe actually study the ICS stuff rather than just skimming it.