so i've been a member of our county ARES group for about 8 months now, been showing up to the monthly nets and doing the training exercises but last weekend we had an actual activation for the flooding situation and it was kind of eye opening in ways i didnt expect

like the training is great and all but nothing really prepares you for the actual coordination side of things. i was stationed at the EOC and we had like four different served agencies all wanting different things and the net control was trying to juggle all of it and honestly it was a little chaotic at first. settled down after a couple hours once the ICS structure got established but man that first stretch was hectic

one thing i wasnt prepared for was how much of it is just... waiting. long stretches of monitoring and then suddenly a burst of traffic and you have to be sharp. my situational awareness definitely could use work. also realized my go bag setup is not as good as i thought it was, ran into some battery issues around hour 6 which was embarassing

anyway just wanted to share, curious if other folks had similar experiences with their first real activations. did it match what you expected from the training exercises?

yeah that sounds about right honestly. my first activation was for a winter storm back in maybe 2019 and i had the exact same feeling about the waiting. people kind of romanticize emergency comms but a huge chunk of it is just sitting there with your ears on making sure you dont miss anything. which sounds easy until you've been doing it for 4 hours straight and you start to zone out a little

the battery thing is a really common lesson learned the hard way. i swapped over to a bigger LiFePO4 setup after my second activation for exactly that reason. most of the emcomm guys i know have gone through at least one power failure during a real event before they finally got their portable power sorted out. dont beat yourself up about it, just fix it before the next one

the ICS stuff clicking into place after a couple hours sounds pretty normal too. a lot of the served agencies dont really have a great feel for how to use us until the situation gets serious enough that they actually need us, then suddenly they figure out the structure real fast. good on you for sticking with it through the rough patch at the start

welcome to real world ARES haha. the exercises are honestly kind of sanitized compared to when there's actual stakes. our EC always says the training gets you to the starting line but the activations are where you actually learn stuff

one thing that helped me a lot was shadowing the net control operators during a few activations before i took on any independent role. just watching how they prioritize traffic and handle the chaos is way more valuable than any drill. does your group do any kind of mentorship pairing for newer members? ours started doing that last year and it made a big difference