so we finally pulled off a full-scale simulated disaster exercise for our county ARES group and man, I don't even know where to start. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out the repeater infrastructure and we had to coordinate shelter-to-shelter traffic using only HF and a couple of handheld VHF stations running simplex. about 14 operators total showed up which was honestly better than I expected.

the biggest lesson for me personally was how fast things fall apart when people aren't used to net discipline. we had three or four guys just talking over each other in the first twenty minutes because nobody was used to waiting for net control to call on them. like we all know the theory but when there's fake urgency and people are excited it just goes sideways real quick. net control (which rotated between two of our more experienced guys) had to keep stopping everything to re-establish order.

also we found out the hard way that our written ICS forms situation is... not great. half the operators had never actually filled out an ICS-213 under any kind of pressure and it showed. the messages were either way too long or missing critical fields. one guy sent a shelter population count with no location identifier at all, just a number. we're going to have to do some dedicated training on that specifically before the next exercise.

the HF side actually went better than expected though. we had a couple guys running Winlink and that worked pretty solid once they got the frequency sorted out. anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what the biggest surprises were for your teams

yeah the ICS forms thing is universal I think. we did a similar tabletop a while back and same issue - people who've been licensed for years and never actually practiced filling out a 213 under any kind of time pressure. its one of those things that looks simple on paper and then you're standing there in a fake emergency with someone waiting on your traffic and your brain just goes blank on what's supposed to go in the precedence field.

the net discipline thing too, completely relate to that. what we ended up doing after our exercise was running short 20-minute practice nets specifically for message handling, just to get people comfortable with the rhythm of it before the next big sim. helped a lot honestly. the other thing that bit us was nobody had a solid backup plan for when the appointed net control couldnt be heard by half the stations - we lost like 15 minutes just figuring out who was going to take over. worth thinking about before your next one if you havent already

this sounds really cool honestly, im still pretty new (got my general about 8 months ago) and ive been wanting to get involved with our local ARES group but wasnt sure if I'd just be in the way during something like this. do they usually let newer hams participate in these exercises or is it more for the experienced folks? I know some basic message handling stuff but definitely never done anything like a real sim