so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated emergency exercise with our county ARES group and i wanted to share some stuff that came up because honestly it was eye opening in ways i didnt expect

the scenario was a major ice storm knocking out power and cell infrastructure across three counties, we had to set up a net, coordinate with the county EOC, and relay health and welfare traffic for a pretend shelter population. sounded simple enough on paper right

biggest lesson for me personally was how bad we are at message handling under pressure. like i thought i knew the ICS-213 format, ive practiced it, but when things started stacking up and the net control was getting buried in check-ins and people were trying to pass traffic at the same time... it got messy fast. we had a few operators just kind of freelancing on the air doing their own thing which was honestly worse than helpful

also the interoperability piece caught us off guard. the fire department liaison showed up with a radio that couldnt hit our repeater and we had no simplex fallback plan that everyone actually knew about in advance. spent like 20 minutes sorting that out during what would have been a critical window

anyway curious if anyone elses group has done something similar recently and what came up for you. we're trying to build a proper after action review process and id love to steal ideas from people who have figured this out

yeah the message handling thing is SO real, we had almost the exact same problem in our drill two years ago. people who sound totally confident on a regular net just kind of freeze up when theres actual simulated pressure and a backlog of traffic. what helped us a lot was doing smaller tabletop exercises more frequently instead of waiting for the big annual drill — like just getting together and running through message passing scenarios verbally without even going on the air, so the format becomes more automatic

the interoperability gap is a tough one. we started maintaining a laminated card at our EOC position with the simplex frequencies pre-agreed with fire and EMS, and every operator who deploys gets a copy. sounds basic but it took us an actual failed drill to figure that out. also worth checking whether your served agencies even have a current copy of your frequencies — ours didnt for a while and nobody noticed until someone thought to ask

for after action reviews, the thing that made the biggest difference for us was having someone who wasnt operating during the exercise take notes in real time. if everybody was in the thick of it they tend to remember their own experience and forget the systemic stuff. even just one person with a notepad walking around observing makes the debrief way more useful

this is really interesting to read as someone whos only been licensed about a year and just joined my local ARES group. i havent been through a full exercise yet, just the orientation stuff. the part about freelancing on the air is something i worry about honestly — like i dont want to be that guy but im also not 100% sure ill know the right call in the moment when things are actually happening

is there any good way to get reps in without waiting for the next big drill? asking because our next county exercise isnt until spring