so our ARES group finally did a proper tabletop exercise Saturday, simulated a major flooding event cutting off three counties from normal comms infrastructure. we had about 14 people show up which was actually pretty good turnout for us.

I've been doing this for about 12 years and I still learned stuff. the big thing that hit me was how fast our net control got overwhelmed when we started injecting multiple simultaneous traffic items. like we planned for it in theory but when the exercise facilitator started throwing in missing persons reports AND a request for a medical resource list AND a shelter status update all at the same time, net control just... froze up a little. not blaming the operator at all, she's great, it just exposed that we hadn't really trained for traffic prioritization under actual pressure.

the other thing that surprised everyone was the ICS form situation. half the people brought different versions of the ICS-213 and a couple guys hadnt filled one out in so long they basically had to be walked through it. we talk about this stuff at meetings but theres a difference between talking and doing.

anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises lately and what blind spots came up for you. we're trying to build a better training calendar for next year and want to steal good ideas from anyone willing to share.

yeah this sounds really familiar honestly. we did something similar about two years ago and the ICS paperwork thing was almost identical for us. guys who had been licensed for 20 years looking at an ICS-213 like they'd never seen one before. i think the problem is a lot of us got trained on it once and then just... never touched it again because day to day operations dont really require it.

what helped us a lot was building a simple laminated quick-reference card that just shows the most common fields and what goes where. nothing fancy just something people can keep in their go-bag. also we started doing a 15 minute forms refresher at the beginning of every quarterly meeting, even if it feels repetitive it keeps the muscle memory there.

the net control overload thing is real too. we actually rotated net control mid-exercise now so that one person isnt stuck handling everything for 4 hours. having an assistant net control who specifically handles logging while the primary handles voice traffic helped a ton.

I'm pretty new to ARES, just joined this past spring, and reading this is actually making me feel better about how much I dont know yet. I sat in on one activation last summer and honestly felt completely lost even though I'd studied for it. nobody's fault just a lot of assumed knowledge that doesn't get explicitly taught.

question for you - when you do these tabletop exercises do you allow new people to just observe first or do you throw everyone in the deep end? i want to participate but also don't want to slow things down if there's an actual learning scenario happening for the experienced folks.