So we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, first one in about two years since everything kind of fell apart during covid. Had maybe 14 operators show up which honestly was better than I expected.

The scenario was a major ice storm knocking out power and cell infrastructure across three counties, EOC activation, shelters needing to be stood up, the whole deal. We ran it for about six hours on a Saturday.

What surprised me the most was how fast things got disorganized at the EOC net control position. We had a really experienced op running it but the sheer volume of traffic from three different served agencies at once just overwhelmed the logging situation. We were using ICS-213 forms and trying to keep a manual log and it just... got messy fast. Nobody was really at fault, we just hadnt practiced that specific scenario where multiple agencies are all wanting status updates at the same time.

Also discovered that two of our operators had never actually done formal traffic handling before. Like they knew the theory but when it came time to pass a formal message they fumbled pretty bad and it slowed everything down. Not throwing anyone under the bus, that's exactly why we do these things.

Anyway curious if other groups have run into similar stuff and what fixes you came up with. The after action review was really useful but we walked away with a pretty long list of things to work on before the next one.

yeah the net control overload thing is super common and i dont think people realize how bad it gets until they're actually in it. we had almost the exact same situation during a Skywarn activation a few years back, wasnt even a full EOC exercise just a severe weather event and the NCS was just getting buried.

what helped us was designating a separate liaison for each served agency so they were the only ones talking to net control on behalf of that agency. NCS only had to deal with like 3 or 4 people total instead of a dozen. took some coordination to set up but it made a huge difference in how clean the traffic flow was. also having a dedicated logger who wasnt doing anything else, just writing stuff down, that alone probably saved us from some real confusion.

the traffic handling gap is real too. we started doing a monthly simplex net specifically for practicing formal message passing and it helped a lot with the newer folks getting comfortable with it before they need to do it under pressure.

This is really interesting to read about, I'm still pretty new and haven't been part of any ARES exercises yet but I've been wanting to get involved. The part about operators fumbling message passing is kind of reassuring honestly because I've been nervous about exactly that — like I've read the ARRL handbook sections on NTS format but reading about something and doing it while someone's waiting on you are very different things.

Is there a good way to practice before jumping into an actual drill? I dont want to be the person slowing things down when it counts.