so our ARES group finally did a full scale exercise last saturday, simulated a major flooding event cutting off three counties from normal comms infrastructure. we had about 14 operators spread across different served agencies and honestly i went in thinking it would go pretty smoothly because we do tabletops all the time. nope.

first thing that fell apart was check-in procedures. net control was getting slammed with traffic from multiple stations at once because nobody had really internalized the proper order of operations when multiple priority messages come in simultaneously. it got chaotic fast and we basically had to pause and regroup after maybe 20 minutes.

second thing - and this is the one that really humbled me - two of our newer operators froze up when asked to handle formal traffic. they know winlink fine, they know how to operate their radios, but when a served agency rep handed them an actual message form and said get this out, there was just this deer in headlights moment. we dont practice that part enough, the handoff from agency to operator, thats where things got wobbly.

the stuff that went well was actually the simplex fallback plan. when we pretended the main repeater was down, guys shifted to simplex without much fuss which was great to see. anyway curious if anyone else has run exercises like this and what your biggest lessons were, especially around training newer ops before the real thing

yeah this is pretty much exactly what we found when our group did something similar a couple years back. the tabletops give you this false sense of security because everyone sounds confident when theres no actual radio traffic to manage. the moment real operators are on the air with real (simulated) pressure its a completely different animal.

the thing about the message handoff is huge and i dont think enough groups practice it. we actually started doing what we call last mile drills where someone physically walks up to an operator and hands them a written message and they have to get it formatted and transmitted while someone else is trying to talk to them at the same time. its uncomfortable but thats kind of the point. the discomfort in training is way better than the discomfort during an actual event.

also worth looking at your ICS integration if you havent already. a lot of the confusion around priority traffic comes from operators not fully understanding where they fit in the incident command structure, like who do you report to when the agency rep and net control are telling you different things. that was a mess for us until we sorted out the chain more clearly.

this is making me feel a bit better honestly, im newer to ARES and the last exercise i did i definitely was one of those deer in headlights people when things got complicated. nobody told me beforehand that the message forms would be coming in handwritten and sometimes barely legible lol. i spent like 3 minutes trying to read one guys handwriting instead of just asking him to clarify which i totally should have done.

does your group do any kind of after action thing where the newer folks can talk through what confused them without feeling dumb about it? thats the part i feel like would help me most, just a space to say hey i had no idea what i was supposed to do in that moment without it being a big debrief with 20 people watching