so we finally did it. our group has been talking about running a proper simulated disaster exercise for like two years now and we actually pulled it off last saturday. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out the county EOC's primary comms infrastructure and we had to stand up a shadow net using our portable gear and coordinate message traffic between four served agencies.

i'll be honest it did not go smoothly at first. we had two operators who showed up without their go kits fully charged, one of our HTs had a programming issue nobody caught until we were live, and the net control guy (no offense Dave) had never actually run a formal net before so the first 20 minutes were kind of chaotic. but that's exactly the point right? you find the gaps in training before a real event does it for you.

the biggest takeaway for me personally was how fast message handling falls apart when people aren't comfortable with ICS-213 forms. like we practice the radio part but nobody ever drills the paperwork side and that's where things got ugly. also our backup frequency plan hadn't been updated since like 2019 so two of the repeaters we planned to use were gone.

anyway curious if other groups here have done similar exercises recently and what tripped you up. feel free to share war stories, this stuff is more useful than any classroom session imo

yeah the ICS form thing is so real. we did a tabletop exercise a while back and honestly the radio operators were fine but trying to get accurate traffic logs and proper message routing was a mess. a few of our guys had never filled out a 213 under any kind of time pressure and it showed. we ended up adding a dedicated training night just for message handling, no radios, just practicing the forms and passing traffic by hand so people got comfortable with the format before we mixed in the RF side of things.

the frequency plan issue hits home too. i think a lot of groups let that stuff drift and dont realize it until you're standing in a parking lot at 7am trying to figure out why nobody's responding on the listed primary. we do a quick frequency verification pass every january now, takes maybe an hour to check everything is still current and the tones are right in our radios.

sounds like a really productive drill though even if it was rough. the messy ones are always the ones you learn the most from in my experience.

this is making me want to push harder for something like this in our section, we mostly just do tabletops and i feel like theres a huge difference between talking through a scenario and actually trying to run traffic under pressure. question though - how did you coordinate the served agencies? did you have actual people playing those roles or was it more like your own operators pretending to be both sides