so we finally ran a full-scale simulated disaster exercise last Saturday, coordinated with the county emergency management office and a couple of the local fire departments. been planning this thing for like three months and honestly I wasnt sure it was going to come together but it did, mostly.

the scenario was a major bridge collapse cutting off the eastern half of the county from emergency services, and we had to establish comm links between the EOC, two shelters, and a forward staging area. We had maybe 14 operators total across all sites which sounds like a lot but when you spread everyone out it gets thin fast.

the good stuff: net control kept things moving, message traffic flowed pretty well once we got everyone settled into the net discipline, and the shelter operators did a great job with their ICS-213 forms. the new guys especially surprised me, they picked up the traffic format faster than some of the people whove been doing this for years.

the not-so-good stuff: holy cow the repeater coverage gaps. we knew about one dead spot but apparently there are two more on the eastern edge that nobody had mapped out. had at least one operator sitting there keying up getting nothing and not realizing the repeater wasnt hitting him. and we had one station that just completely lost it on frequencies during the early chaos - kept jumping around and stepping on traffic. nobody's fault really, it's just what happens when the adrenaline kicks in even in a drill.

biggest lesson for me personally was that we need a simplex fallback plan that everyone has actually practiced, not just written down in the binder. because when we tried to go simplex at one point to work around the repeater issue, half the operators didn't know what frequency we'd agreed on. so that's on us for not drilling it separately first.

anyone else done these kinds of county-level exercises? curious what tripped you up the first time or what you did to tighten things up on the second go-round.

yeah the simplex fallback thing gets almost everyone the first time, we had basically the same problem two years ago. the binder is great until nobody can find the binder lol. what ended up working for our group was we made a little laminated card that every operator keeps in their go bag with the primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency frequencies on it - basically the PACE plan on a card. sounds obvious in hindsight but we went probably four drills before someone finally suggested it.

the repeater coverage gap thing is a real pain to sort out and you kind of can't know until you actually go drive the county with a radio and a notebook. we did a coverage mapping day last spring where a few of us just drove around for a Saturday morning hitting the repeater and logging where we lost it. found three spots we didn't know about. totally worth doing if you havent.

sounds like the exercise overall was a success though, honestly finding those gaps during a drill is exactly the point. beats finding out during an actual event.

im pretty new to ARES, only been involved since last fall, but I was at a smaller tabletop exercise our group did a few months back and even that was kind of eye opening. we weren't even on the air, just sitting around a table talking through a scenario and I still felt kind of lost at a few points when people started throwing around ICS terminology fast.

I think what you said about net discipline is really the thing I want to get better at before our next actual drill. like I know the theory but when things speed up I can feel myself second-guessing whether to break in or just wait. do you guys do any kind of separate training just for that, like net control practice sessions or anything? or is it mostly just learn by doing