Drills, exercises, tests. By any name, periodic exercises are used to evaluate the effectiveness of training and plans just as classroom tests are used to test the effectiveness of teaching. Exercises are particularly important tools used to measure the readiness of trained organizations such as military units, public safety agencies or ARES/RACES groups. They provide low risk - if not low stress - opportunities for the leadership to determine what works and what needs further development, and for participants to sharpen their communication skills. This is why the ARRL strongly recommends participation in its annual Simulated Emergency Test (SET).
However, exercises are only valuable if three conditions are met:
To be meaningful, exercises must have clearly defined goals. These may include:
The new Georgia Section ARES Emergency Communications Operations Plan has been distributed to the District Emergency Coordinators for review, and will be released to the Section ARES shortly. In general, this plan addresses operations of the State ARES only when required to meet a statewide need-that is, it recognizes and specifically delegates to the districts and county jurisdictions local operations and planning.
Rather than tell you how to operate at the local level, it provides information helpful to you, the local emergency coordinator, to effectively plan and execute operations in your jurisdiction.
You may have already noticed my emphasis on training and planning-all with the goal of making the local and district emergency coordinators more effective at managing emergency communications in your jurisdictions.
While light on specific operational direction, the plan does identify certain responsibilities of DEC's and EC's which will ensure effective operations when our operations as a statewide unit are required. To that end, the plan specifically states that:
This station should be located where the DEC most regularly needs to operate to effectively manage a disaster situation in the district. This may be at a served agency, EOC, the DEC's home station or even may be a mobile station as appropriate. The station must be capable of operating under emergency power for a minimum of 24 hours.
This station should be located where the EC most regularly needs to operate to effectively manage a disaster situation in the county jurisdiction(s). This may be at a served agency, EOC, the EC's (or an AEC's) home station or even may be a mobile station as appropriate. The station must be capable of operating under emergency power for a minimum of 24 hours.
This should not really come as new news to anyone-in fact, it's based on common sense. That is, the DEC's must be able to communicate via amateur radio with each other on a statewide basis and EC's must be able to communicate with each other and with their DEC via amateur radio within a district.
So the specific goal of the 2002 Georgia Section ARES Simulated Emergency Test will be to test our statewide and district-wide communications (HF and VHF phone) procedures. In addition, since the needs of our served agencies are changing in the age of homeland security and since we have such wide geography that must be covered by our limited resources, a secondary goal will be to provide effective statewide communications from portable or field locations.
There are three types of exercises most used by ARES groups: full-scale, tabletop, and functional. Which one you choose depends on your goals. Full-scale exercises can help simulate the stresses that occur to network operations during a disaster. Tabletop and Functional exercises are good alternatives to the full-scale exercise for the introduction of new procedures and systems.
Functional exercises may utilize the same facilities as full- scale drills, whether physical facilities such as EOCs or radio nets are used. Most participants perform their typical roles while a smaller group serves as simulators. Functional exercises can also be run with all participants communicating from their homes, simply adopting the roles they would have in a full-scale drill.
The 2002 Georgia Section ARES Simulated Emergency Test will be a functional exercise designed to test Statewide, District-wide and local in-county communications.
Following dispatch the counties are to operate their assigned scenario and furnish reports back to the DEC, who will collect the reports and generate a summary report for the district. All exercises are to be completed with DEC/EC check-ins at 1PM.
Details on what reports are needed from the EC's to DEC's to State will be listed the morning of the exercise.
Communications flow will come from the State to the DEC's, from the DEC's to the EC's to the ARES members in the county.
If you have specialized communications facilities within the county level you would like to test, please feel free to do so.
Feedback on exercise performance must be promptly given to all participants.
In order to ensure quick and effective feedback, all DEC's must complete their final reports and send them to the Section Emergency Coordinator, Mike Boatright, KO4WX, via email, telephone or amateur radio no later than 1200 noon on Sunday, October 6, 2002. The results of the 2002 Georgia Section ARES Simulated Emergency Test will be announced on the section ARES HF net, at 2200Z on 3975KHz. DEC's and EC's are encouraged to make arrangements to retransmit this net on VHF (ensuring, of course, that an appropriately licensed amateur is at the control point for the retransmission) so that all amateurs participating in the SET may hear the results of this test.
More details as necessary, as well as the new Georgia Section ARES Emergency Communications Operations Plan will be available prior to the October 5 exercise.