so we finally got enough people together to run a proper simulated emergency exercise, been trying to organize this for like 8 months and kept having to push it back. we had about 14 operators spread across three sites — the EOC, a shelter at the high school, and a mobile unit running around in a van. I was net control at the EOC side.

honestly it went better than I expected in some ways and way worse in others. the radio stuff mostly worked fine, our nets were solid, people remembered their procedures. what completely fell apart was the message handling. like, we had operators who are great on the air but when it came to actually filling out ICS forms and passing traffic in a structured way it was a mess. half the messages came through with missing info or in the wrong format and we basically had to stop the sim twice to go over it again.

the other thing that caught me off guard — we lost one of our key operators about 90 minutes in because he had a real family thing come up and just had to leave. and suddenly we realized we had no backup for his role at the shelter. in a real event that would have been a serious problem. we kind of improvised but it showed a real gap in how we think about redundancy for people not just equipment.

anyway curious if others have done these kinds of exercises and what surprised you the most. also wondering if theres a good resource for simplified ICS message templates that are easier to use under pressure

yeah the message handling thing is really common, almost every group I've seen run their first real sim runs into exactly that. people practice the radio part at home but nobody practices sitting at a table filling out a 213 while someone's talking to them and there's noise everywhere. it's a completely different skill.

what helped our group a lot was doing a tabletop first — no radios at all, just people sitting around passing paper messages and filling out forms. sounds boring but it exposed so many gaps before we ever keyed up. once they've done the paperwork part in a low-stress environment they handle it much better when the radios are involved too.

as for templates, ARRL has some simplified versions but honestly I'd check with your section's ARES EC because a lot of regions have their own modified forms that local served agencies actually prefer. the national standard stuff is fine but some EOCs have their own workflows and its worth matching what they actually use day to day.

and yeah the backup person thing — we literally have a written roster now with primary and alternate for every single function. learned that the hard way during a real activation not even an exercise, lost our net control guy to a medical issue partway through and it was not a fun scramble.

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new to ARES and havnt done a sim exercise yet but my EC keeps talking about getting one organized. reading your post kind of makes me nervous about the ICS stuff because i've looked at those forms and they seem really confusing honestly. do you think someone with like only a year of ham experience can actually be useful in one of these or is it better to just observe the first time?