so we ran a simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group last saturday and honestly i wasnt prepared for how much i didnt know. the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off several towns from normal comms infrastructure and we had to establish a net, pass formal traffic, coordinate with the EOC and handle simulated resource requests all at the same time.

what really got me was how fast things fell apart when two people tried to net control at the same time. we had one guy on a repeater and another trying to run simplex and nobody had agreed beforehand which took priority. just total confusion for like 20 minutes and in a real event that could matter a lot. also battery power was a bigger issue than expected — one of our newer guys had his HT die after about 3 hours because he forgot to charge it the night before.

afterward we did a debrief and the lessons were pretty humbling. things that seem obvious on paper just dont hold up when people are stressed and tired. we're going to do another drill in about 6 weeks and im wondering if anyone has suggestions for scenarios that really stress-test the weak points in a group. what have you all found to be the most valuable exercises? especially curious if anyone has done multi-agency stuff with CERT or local fire department.

yeah the dual net control thing is a really common failure mode, we ran into the exact same problem about two years ago. what fixed it for us was writing up a one-page ICS-style checklist that every operator gets before the exercise starts, just clearly lays out who's primary NCS, who's backup and what frequency plan we're running. sounds almost too simple but having it printed out means nobody has to remember it under pressure.

the multi-agency stuff is absolutely worth doing if you can pull it off. we did a joint exercise with the county fire liaison last spring and the biggest takeaway was that they have no idea how we operate and honestly we had some wrong assumptions about them too. just getting in the same room and walking through a scenario without any radios was more valuable than i expected. the communication breakdowns were almost always about terminology and assumed knowledge, not technical stuff.

for your next drill i'd suggest throwing in an inject partway through — like simulate a key operator having to drop out suddenly, or give someone a message with a deliberate error in it and see if anyone catches it. those little wrinkles reveal a lot about how resilient your group actually is versus how resilient you think you are.

the battery thing you mentioned is so real. i did my first real activation (not a drill, actual wind storm event) a couple years back and even i forgot to top off my spare pack the morning of. ended up borrowing a cable from someone else to charge off their car. not ideal. now i literally have a go-bag checklist taped inside the lid and battery check is the first item.

havent done multi-agency stuff but id love to hear more if your group ends up doing it.