So we ran a simulated disaster exercise with our local ARES group last Saturday, the scenario was a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from surrounding served agencies. About 14 operators showed up which was honestly better turnout than I expected for a Saturday morning.

Things started fine, we had net control set up at the EOC, repeater was working, everyone checked in. Then someone decided to throw in an injects — they told us the repeater just went down. Had to scramble to simplex and honestly that's where things got real interesting fast. Turns out about half the group either didn't know the simplex calling frequency we'd agreed on or couldn't hear each other because of terrain. We just kind of assumed everyone remembered the plan from the last meeting like six months ago.

The other thing that caught us off guard was message handling. We had people trying to do ICS 213s but a couple operators had never actually filled one out under any kind of time pressure before. Reading it aloud over the air takes way longer than you'd think when youre trying to stay concise and accurate at the same time.

Not complaining though, this is exactly why we do these. Would love to hear if anyone else has run into similar stuff or what scenarios your groups have tried. We're trying to build a better exercise for the fall.

yeah the repeater failure inject is a classic and it gets people every single time, doesn't matter how many times you warn folks ahead of time. We did something similar about two years ago and same result — half the group defaulted to just calling on the repeater out of habit even after being told it was down. Muscle memory is a real thing.

One thing that helped us a lot was doing a short tabletop before the actual exercise, just 30 minutes going over the comms plan and making sure everyone had the simplex freqs actually programmed and not just written on a piece of paper somewhere. Also we started requiring everyone to make at least one simplex contact during check-in just to verify the path works before the scenario even starts. Sounds like overkill but it saved us a lot of confusion mid-exercise.

The ICS 213 thing is real too. We practice those separately now, like a standalone drill where thats the only focus. Trying to learn message handling AND manage net operations at the same time is just too much for newer operators.

im pretty new to ARES, just joined a few months ago, and reading this is kind of reassuring honestly because I felt so lost at our last exercise. didnt want to say anything because everyone else seemed to know what they were doing but I definitely had no idea what to do when the net control asked me to relay a traffic message. just kind of fumbled through it.

is there like a good resource for practicing the message stuff on your own before an exercise? or does your group do any kind of mentoring pairing where a newer person works alongside someone more experienced during the drill?