so we finally got the local ARES group together for a tabletop exercise, scenario was a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from surrounding shelters. nothing super fancy, just printed maps and a whiteboard but man it exposed some stuff I really wasn't prepared for.

biggest thing that jumped out at me was how fast everyone defaulted to their cell phones even in a simulated comms-out scenario. like we had to keep reminding people that in the scenario the cell towers are down, stop texting. that alone was kind of eye opening because these are licensed hams who have been around for years, muscle memory is a real thing I guess.

we also realized pretty quick that our net control guy (who is great, dont get me wrong) was the only one who really knew how to run formal traffic. everyone else kind of fumbled with message format and a couple people had never actually sent an ICS-213 over the air before. we practice ragchewing and contesting but structured emergency traffic is a whole different headache.

anyway wondering if other groups have run similar exercises and what suprised you the most when things went sideways. also curious if anyone has a good template for escalating complexity in these scenarios, we want to do a full simulated deployment next quarter and I have no idea how to structure the inject schedule

yeah the cell phone thing is almost universal, we had the exact same problem at our last drill. one of our guys actually had his phone out looking up the ICS form number while we were mid-exercise and didn't even realize he was doing it. we started doing this thing where everyone puts phones face down on the table at the start and it helped a little but not totally.

for inject schedules honestly the best advice I got was to start slow and then pile on faster than feels comfortable. real disasters dont give you time to catch your breath between problems so your second or third inject should come before people have fully resolved the first one. creates that pressure that shows you where the gaps are. FEMA has some tabletop facilitation guides on their site that are actually decent if you dig around, they're written for general emergency management but translate pretty well to the ham side of things. the one thing i'd add is make sure someone is designated as the observer who isn't playing, just watching and writing down everything that goes wrong. debriefing is where you actually learn stuff

this is making me want to get our group to actually do one of these. we talk about it every meeting but somehow never pull the trigger. how long did the whole thing run and how many people did you have? we've got maybe 8-10 active members and i'm worried it won't be enough to make it feel realistic