so we finally ran a full scale simcom exercise with the county emergency management folks last saturday and honestly it was kind of humbling. we've been doing tabletop stuff for months and i thought we were pretty prepared but when you actually have to stand up nets, coordinate with served agencies, and handle simulated message traffic all at the same time things get messy real fast.

the biggest thing that caught us off guard was just the sheer volume of ICS-213 traffic that started flowing once the scenario ramped up. we had two operators at the EOC and they were completely buried. nobody had really thought through how to prioritize incoming vs outgoing traffic in a realistic way, like we always kind of assumed it would be manageable but a real event isnt going to wait for you to catch up.

also our backup power situation turned out to be more of a question mark than we expected. one of the guys had a generator that hadn't been tested in about a year and yeah, it didn't want to start. so that was a fun moment. lesson learned there for sure.

curious if anyone else has run exercises recently and what suprised you most. we're trying to figure out what to focus on for training over the next few months before the next drill.

yeah that ICS-213 traffic pile-up is basically a rite of passage for any group doing their first realistic exercise. we ran into the exact same wall maybe three years ago during a statewide AUXCOMM drill. what helped us a lot was designating one person strictly as a traffic handler and keeping them completely off the net coordination duties. sounds obvious in retrospect but when you're short on bodies everyone ends up trying to do everything and it just falls apart.

the generator thing is unfortunately super common. i've started telling every emcomm operator in our group to run their backup power under load for at least 30 minutes every three months, not just a quick start test. a lot of problems only show up when the thing is actually working hard. anyway sounds like you got a lot of good data from the exercise even if it was uncomfortable in the moment, which is kind of the whole point right

im kind of new to ARES, just joined a few months ago, and reading this is making me realize i probably need to get way more comfortable with message handling before anything like this. i can work the radio fine but the whole formal traffic and ICS forms side of things still feels pretty foreign to me. does your group do any smaller practice sessions for that stuff or is it mostly just the big exercises?