so i've been a member of our local ARES group for about eight months now, mostly just going to the monthly nets and doing the ICS training courses online. honestly i wasnt sure i'd ever actually get deployed because our county is pretty quiet, but last weekend we had a pretty serious flooding situation and the EC called everyone in.

ended up spending about 14 hours at the EOC running HF traffic to a shelter that had lost their cell service and their internet was spotty at best. used Winlink for most of it which worked great once i got the VARA tuned in, but we also did some voice passes on 40m when the digital link was being flaky. the whole thing was way more intense than i expected, not technically really, more just the pace of it and the fact that people were actually depending on what you were doing. different feeling than a drill for sure.

anyway my main question for anyone who's been doing this longer than me — do most groups do formal debriefs after activations? our EC kind of did an informal chat at the end but i feel like there was a lot to learn from and im not sure if thats a standard thing or just depends on the group

yeah debriefs really do vary a lot by group, from what ive seen. some ECs are really good about it and do a proper after-action review within a day or two while everything is fresh, others kind of just move on. the groups that take it seriously tend to get better over time because you're actually identifying what broke down and what worked well.

if your EC didnt do a formal one you could always just write up your own notes and share them with the group, sometimes that prompts others to do the same and it becomes a thing. i started doing that after my second activation years ago and it actually helped me remember details that would have been totally gone a week later.

also congrats on your first real activation, 14 hours at the EOC for a flood event is no joke. Winlink over VARA is kind of the workhorse now isnt it, glad it mostly cooperated for you.

that sounds like a solid first go honestly. our group does a debrief but its usually pretty short, maybe 20 minutes at the next monthly meeting. i think it depends heavily on the EC and how much time they have. the groups that are really organized about it usually have a template they fill out, like an ICS 214 type thing, which makes the debrief easier because everyone has their notes already written down during the event rather than trying to remember after.

one thing nobody told me before my first activation was how much of the job is just sitting there waiting and then suddenly everything happens at once. sounds like you figured that out pretty quick though.