so we ran a simulated disaster exercise last saturday, countywide thing coordinated with the EOC and our local ARES group. the scenario was a major flood event cutting off two townships from normal comms infrastructure, cell towers down, repeater on backup power. we had maybe 14 operators deployed across various shelter and resource sites.

i'll be honest i've been doing this for about three years now and i thought i knew what to expect but there were some real gaps that showed up. the biggest one for me personally was net discipline under pressure. when traffic started stacking up people were stepping on each other constantly, and a couple of the newer guys weren't using prowords correctly so the NCS kept having to ask for repeats. totally slows everything down when you're trying to move health and welfare traffic.

also our ICS integration was shakier than i expected. the simulated EOC staff (played by some of our more experienced members) were asking for things in formats we hadn't really drilled on. like resource requests formatted for the actual ICS forms, not just informal voice traffic. we got through it but it was messy.

anyone else run exercises recently and come away with stuff like this? curious what other groups are doing to prep better between drills, especially around that ICS paperwork side of things.

yeah the ICS form thing catches a lot of groups off guard. we had almost the exact same issue a couple years back when our county emergency manager started actually expecting proper 213s being relayed over radio. the problem is most hams train on the radio side and assume someone else handles the paperwork, but when youre the comms link between a shelter and the EOC you end up being responsible for both ends of that message flow.

what helped us was doing a separate tabletop just focused on message formatting before we did any RF at all. boring as heck but after that our actual deployment exercises went way smoother. also worth getting a couple of your folks trained to at least ICS-100 and 200 if they havent already, it changes how people think about the comms role during an activation.

the stepping on each other thing is just practice practice practice. some of it is nerves during a drill that wouldnt be there on a real activation, but most of it is just people not being used to formal net discipline. running weekly nets even low traffic ones helps a lot.

this is making me nervous about my first drill coming up next month lol. im relatively new, only been licensed about 8 months and this will be my first ARES exercise. i've been studying the ARRL emcomm materials and practicing net procedures at home but reading stuff like this makes me realize theres probably a lot i haven't even thought about yet. is it better to just stay quiet and observe during my first one or should i try to take on some actual traffic handling?