so we finally did a full scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group last saturday. the scenario was a major earthquake that knocked out most of the infrastructure in the county and we had to set up emergency nets, coordinate with served agencies, the whole deal. we had maybe 18 operators show up which is honestly more than i expected.

here's the thing though - and i dont think anyone wants to admit this out loud - we kind of fell apart in the first hour. net control was overwhelmed almost immediately because people were checking in on the wrong frequency, we had three different operators trying to relay the same traffic to the EOC at the same time, and one guy's go-kit battery died within like 45 minutes even though he swore it was fully charged before he left home. i wont name names but you know who you are.

what really surprised me was how fast things got confusing even with everyone being experienced licensed operators. when there's no actual emergency people get a little lazy in training i guess and it showed. we did eventually get things running smoother in the second half and the after action debrief was actually really good, lot of honest conversation.

anyway im curious if other groups have run into this kind of thing. like what were the big lessons your group learned from doing drills? especially anything about net control procedures or go-kit readiness because those seem like our two biggest gaps right now.

yeah this sounds extremely familiar honestly. we did a similar drill about two years ago and the battery thing especially - it's almost a rite of passage at this point. everyone thinks their battery is good until it isn't. after our drill we basically made it a rule that every go-kit gets load tested within 48 hours before any activation, drill or real. it felt like overkill at first but the number of people who discovered their batteries were way more degraded than they thought was pretty eye opening.

the net control overload thing is real too. what helped us a lot was actually having a designated net control relief operator from the start, not just assigning someone when things went sideways. also we started doing tabletop exercises in between the big field drills - way less glamorous but you can work through the ICS paperwork and traffic handling procedures without all the chaos of people fumbling with antennas in a parking lot. the debrief being honest is huge, that's actually the most important part and a lot of groups skip it or make it too polite to be useful.

I'm still pretty new to ARES stuff, only been involved about eight months, but we had a drill earlier this year and even as a new person I could tell the communication flow was kind of a mess at first. one thing our EC mentioned afterward was that a lot of people practice the radio part but not the message handling part - like actually writing and passing formal traffic correctly under pressure. that's apparently where things break down a lot in real events.

also kind of off topic but the go-kit battery thing you mentioned made me check mine when i got home and yeah mine was sitting at like 60% even though i last charged it in february and thought it would hold. so thanks for that accidental reminder i guess.