so we finally got our county ARES group to run a proper simulated disaster exercise last Saturday and I figured I'd write up some of what went wrong because honestly the lessons are more useful than what went right

we were doing a scenario based on a major ice storm knocking out power and phone infrastructure across the county, EOC needed to coordinate with shelters and the hospital, pretty standard stuff on paper. what we did NOT account for was how quickly the net control operator gets overwhelmed when three or four stations all check in at the same time with traffic. our NCS guy is experienced but he visibly struggled keeping up and we were only running like 8 stations. in a real event we could have 20 or 30 trying to push traffic through and I dont even want to think about that

also the message handling was a mess. we had people using ICS 213 forms who hadnt really practiced filling them out under any kind of stress and some of the messages came through garbled or incomplete. one station sent us a shelter population count but forgot to include which shelter they were reporting on. in a real event that kind of thing costs time you dont have

anyway im curious if other groups have found good ways to train for the NCS overload problem specifically, or if anyone has done exercises where they intentionally inject that kind of chaos to prepare people for it

yeah the NCS bottleneck thing is real and it bites almost every group the first time they do a serious drill. what we ended up doing was splitting into tactical nets — basically one net for each geographic zone feeding into a coordination net at the top. it adds complexity but it also means no single NCS is getting buried. took us a couple exercises to get the handoffs smooth but it made a huge difference

the ICS 213 thing is also something we deal with constantly. we actually started doing short standalone form-filling exercises at our monthly meetings, like someone reads out a scenario and everyone fills out the form and then we compare notes. sounds boring but it really does build the muscle memory. people freeze up on the sender/receiver fields more than you'd think, especially when they're also trying to manage their radio at the same time

one other thing we added to our drills is what we call an inject — basically someone playing the role of a frustrated served agency rep who keeps asking for information that wasn't in the original traffic. it simulates the reality that the EOC is never just passively waiting for your messages, they're going to have follow-up questions and your operators need to handle that without breaking net discipline

this is actually making me want to get more involved with my local ARES, ive been licensed for two years and mostly just do casual HF stuff but disaster prep is kind of why I got my license in the first place if im honest. do most groups welcome people who are still pretty green or is there a baseline skill level expected before you show up to a drill