so our ARES group ran a tabletop exercise last saturday, simulated a major flooding event cutting off three counties from normal comms infrastructure. i've been doing this for about six years now and i still learned stuff i didn't expect to.

the biggest thing that got us was logistics tracking. we had operators deployed to shelters and a couple at EOC but nobody had really thought through how we were going to track who was where, what equipment they had, and when they needed relief. we just kind of assumed that would sort itself out and it really didn't. our net control kept losing track of which shelter had which operator and at one point thought a guy was at the high school when he'd actually moved to the community center.

also our backup power situation looked great on paper - everyone said they had batteries and generators - but when we actually started asking specifics during the exercise it turned out two of our guys hadn't tested their batteries in over a year and one generator hadn't been started since the previous hurricane season. we didn't find that out until we were like two hours into the scenario which in a real event could be really bad.

curious if other groups have run into similar stuff or if anyone has a good system for tracking deployed operators that actually works in the field. we've tried paper logs but they get messy fast when things are moving quick.

the operator tracking thing is a real problem and honestly i think most groups dont figure it out until they're in the middle of a mess like you described. we had almost the exact same issue in a exercise a couple years back.

what we ended up doing was designating one person at EOC whose only job was maintaining the deployment board - nothing else, no traffic handling, just tracking. we use a whiteboard with a simple grid, callsign, location, time of check-in, equipment noted, and scheduled check-in time. sounds old school but it works better than anything digital we tried because everyone can see it at a glance and you dont need to be logged into anything.

the battery thing is a whole separate conversation. we now require everyone to do a load test on their main battery before any activation, not just a voltage check. a battery can read fine sitting there and then fall apart under load. some guys resisted it at first but after one of our members had his station go dark in a real activation a few years ago they kind of came around.

yeah tabletops have a way of exposing the gaps you didn't know you had. im relatively new to ARES, only been involved about a year, but even I noticed in our last drill that we were spending way too much time on radio stuff and not enough on actually understanding what the served agencies needed from us. like we were so focused on passing traffic correctly that nobody was really asking the EOC coordinator what information they actually wanted us to relay vs what we were just assuming they needed.

i think there's something to be said for having someone play devil's advocate during these exercises whose job is specifically to throw in complications - equipment fails, operator gets sick, shelter location changes - rather than running the scenario too smoothly. ours went a little too well in places and i wonder if we were cutting corners without realizing it.