so we had our quarterly drill saturday and man did we screw up bad. the scenario was a tornado hit the county fairgrounds during a festival and we had to set up emergency comms for the red cross shelter. sounds simple right?

well first off half the guys showed up without their go kits charged. then when we tried to set up the 2m repeater link it kept dropping out because apparently nobody checked the backup power at the site in months. took us almost 45 minutes just to get a stable connection to the EOC.

but the real disaster was traffic handling - we had like 8 health and welfare messages come in at once and people were stepping all over each other trying to log them. total chaos. our net control guy was getting flustered and started making mistakes on the message forms.

i know its just practice but if this was real people would be screwed. anyone else have drills that went sideways like this? what did you learn from it

oh man sounds like you guys had the same problems we did last year. the power thing is huge - we started doing monthly checks on all the backup batteries after our UPS died during a winter storm exercise. nothing like trying to explain to the emergency manager why the hams cant talk to anyone lol

for the traffic handling mess, we switched to having one person just log everything and then sort it out later instead of trying to relay in real time. way less confusing. also helps to have someone whos not on the radio double checking the forms

This is why I keep saying we need more realistic training scenarios. Too many groups just do the basic "check in and pass one message" drill and call it good. Real emergencies are messy and confusing and people are stressed.

We started doing no-notice drills where the EC just shows up at your house and says go activate right now. Really exposes who actually keeps their gear ready vs who talks a good game. Also helps to cross train people on different roles so you have backup net control operators.