Why was nims developed

If that coordination depends to a large degree on ad hoc improvisation, however, it is likely to be slow to take hold or fall short of what is needed. Responders would have to figure out how to divide responsibilities, establish common procedures, and mutually adjust operations — all under the intense pressures of disaster conditions.

By contrast, NIMS can reduce these frictions and improve the speed and effectiveness of emergency operations that involve diverse response organizations by serving as a common system that response organizations of all types adopt, train for, exercise, and use. The United States has more than 89, units of subnational government 7 : states, counties, municipalities, school districts, and special districts.

To achieve the potential benefits of a standardized emergency management system that fosters effective coordination, NIMS must be diffused across levels of government and jurisdictions, must be accepted by diverse professions, must take root in hundreds of thousands of individual agencies and organizations, and must spread through the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Unlike many other kinds of innovation, responsibility for NIMS cannot be assigned to a special organizational unit in each of these entities; rather it requires full engagement by all agency personnel at the operating level.

As the scale of response expands, responders may organize sub-units of the four core sections, either by functional specialization e. See Figures 1 and 2, respectively, for depictions of a basic ICS structure and an expanded structure for complex events.

Figure 1. Figure 2. An integrated command structure under a single IC is typically employed when emergency responders come from a single agency or jurisdiction or in mutual aid situations where there is no ambiguity about lines of authority over all responders. Unified command, by contrast, is employed when no single hierarchy of authority exists as when responders come from multiple political jurisdictions to connect the full set of deployed responders who must collaborate.

Unified Command then provides a potentially effective voluntary means of integrating decision making and allocation of resources. To seek to ensure that ICS is used as universally as possible, the federal government issued NIMS implementation requirements starting in FY which gave jurisdictions two years to comply with the full array of NIMS implementation standards. States also provide additional documentation, outside the grant funding process, to the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA on an annual basis attesting to their NIMS compliance; but, again, this process allows for self-certification by each state.

Nor does the federal government track NIMS implementation in specific disciplines e. Although it has only lightly enforced NIMS compliance, FEMA has fostered NIMS implementation by issuing guidance documents to all levels of government, as well as to private industry and nonprofit organizations, to describe in general form what would constitute compliance.

Tailoring NIMS guidance and resources to different groups may also reduce resistance to NIMS implementation within organizations that have not previously used NIMS and may be wary of changing their routines or adopting systems developed outside.

It is worth noting that the federal government has recently prioritized engagement of a broader cross-section of American society in emergency management efforts.

Understanding the differences among professions that participate in emergency response, particularly the contrast between first responders and other disciplines, is critical to evaluating the success of NIMS implementation thus far and improving NIMS moving forward.

But other public and non-public agencies may become crucial actors in emergencies. Howitt and Makler use the imagery of concentric circles where the inner circle is occupied by agencies whose principal mission is emergency management and the outer circles contain all the other organizations with potential involvement in emergency-related activities. They assert that agencies whose primary purpose is to respond to emergencies should be deemed first responders; and other organizations, whose roles in emergency response are not usually part of their core missions, should fall outside this category.

The inner circle contains traditional first responders fire, police, and emergency medicine and emergency management agencies. The second circle contains organizations whose primary missions are not emergency-focused but which often find themselves directly involved in emergency response efforts alongside first responders. This category includes disciplines such as transportation, public health, public works, and utilities.

Private businesses, religious institutions, and schools typically provide support services and resources to frontline responders in the emergency response phase of an incident, while taking on a greater share of direct service delivery to disaster victims in the recovery phase. September 11 th led to a flurry of emergency preparedness initiatives within the transportation sector.

Guidance documents began emphasizing general emergency preparedness over terrorism-specific preparedness, and references to the National Incident Management System NIMS began to emerge. However, the transportation sector must cope with the fact that transportation-specific NIMS compliance standards are not available, and where guidance has been issued, it is not consistent. However, the recommendations vary.

In the literature, several factors are consistently identified as having an impact on NIMS implementation or emergency preparedness in general. These factors were subsequently used as a starting guide for our interviews with transportation agency representatives.

To explore how NIMS implementation is progressing in transportation agencies, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews by phone or in person with agency emergency management and security officials.

A set of open-ended questions about NIMS implementation guided all interviews at the start. These questions were based on findings and conclusions from the existing literature on NIMS implementation, adapted and extended for a focus on second circle agencies rather than first response organizations. See appendix 1 for a list of these questions. Depending on the answers provided by interview subjects, we asked a series of additional questions that were customized to a specific interview.

As seemed appropriate for a topic that had not been previously much studied, we purposefully traded the potential breadth of a broadly based, random-sample survey for the depth of longer, more intensive, more customized interviews. To provide variation in our non-random sample, we focused our interviews on city and metro transportation agencies that would afford a view of a geographically diverse mix of transportation agencies in large metropolitan areas the sample includes agencies on the East and West coasts, the Midwest, and the Southwest.

We also interviewed the corresponding state-level transportation agencies for these metro areas in order to understand the interplay between these two levels, as well as to learn if there were differences in NIMS implementation results at the state and metropolitan agency levels.

In all, the research team conducted interviews with twelve city, metro, or state-level transportation agencies in five states and with two federal agencies between October and February A list of agencies participating in this study is presented in Figure 4. A shortcoming of this interview approach is that our relatively small sample size does not permit confident generalizations. However, we hope this exploratory research will serve as a starting point for broader investigation and analysis of NIMS implementation in transportation and other second and third circle response organizations in the future.

In terms of actual use of NIMS, the interviews revealed a range of practices and experiences. For the most part, the transportation agencies interviewed did not use NIMS on a day-to-day basis but almost always used it during incident responses that required engagement with first responders and other external organizations.

An EOC is typically activated during an emergency by the affected municipality at a location, away from the incident scene, where multiple agencies and organizations come together to provide coordinated support to the operations occurring at the scene s of the incident.

It is important to reiterate that EOCs provide support to on-scene operations. During routine, non-emergency operations, these agencies usually function under a quite different model. A central Transit Control Center is in active command of the entire transit system instead of this authority being decentralized to in-the-field personnel. Given the complex transit operating environment e.

Figures 5 and 6 provide an overview of the perspectives of our interview respondents. Each factor identified by interviewees is connected back to the factor s identified in the literature review in parentheses in Figures 5 and 6. Several interview respondents highlighted the added benefit of having a formal statement of support from their leadership which helped to achieve greater acceptance of and involvement in the NIMS implementation effort agency-wide.

In addition, external collaboration with first circle response organizations is also critical to transportation agencies, especially to the city and metro transportation agencies. These transportation agencies rely most heavily on local and state emergency management agencies for support with NIMS implementation since these agencies typically provide guidance and monitor overall NIMS compliance within their respective jurisdictions.

Emergency management agencies also typically provide a significant number of free, classroom-based NIMS trainings to area emergency responders. These training opportunities were highly valued by the transportation agencies interviewed because most did not have the internal resources to conduct the trainings themselves. For all these reasons, strong relationships with emergency management agencies were perceived as very important for successful NIMS implementation by transportation organizations.

Transportation agencies also referred to a number of other external groups with whom they collaborated on NIMS-related activities. Those most often cited, aside from emergency management agencies, were law enforcement police, sheriff, highway patrol , fire departments, FEMA, the federal Transportation Security Administration TSA , other transportation agencies, hospitals, and EMS, in that order.

The most beneficial collaborations with these and other groups, in terms of improving NIMS proficiency, were multi-agency drills and exercises.

While simulated incidents — i. Many interviewees talked about how their agencies tended to take emergency preparedness and NIMS implementation more seriously after being involved in large-scale incident responses.

Funding issues also loomed large during the interview discussions. However, grant funding has diminished significantly in recent years, 54 and transportation agencies have not been able to make up for this loss through internal budgets. Dedicating funding, staff, and other assets to emergency preparedness rather than to core operational tasks like transporting customers and maintaining equipment has proved a hard-sell for these resource-constrained agencies. Interview respondents noted that understanding this tendency and developing strategies to overcome it are critical to successful NIMS implementation in their organizations.

One strategy mentioned is how VIA in San Antonio, realizing the difficulty it was facing finding funding for NIMS training, succeeded in embedding NIMS training into its mission-critical Operations Refresher training, thereby not incurring the additional backfill and overtime costs it would have if NIMS training was conducted separately from the Operations Refresher training. Even for agencies committed to implementing NIMS and having the resources to do so, attainment of this goal can prove elusive when compliance standards are unclear or unavailable.

It has also developed guidelines specific to healthcare, but it has not developed NIMS specific standards — i. As seen in Figure 8, there is currently significant variation in the types of workers that transportation agencies require to take NIMS trainings.

Baseline Training. Emergency Mgmt Personnel. Full-time Emergency Mgmt Staff. Emergency Team, Senior Management. If you are a public official, please sign in here to see the contact details of the innovator.

NIMS consists of a standardised emergency management structure implemented at federal, state, tribal and local governments, NGOs and the private sector to respond to demands arising from crisis situations..

It fosters interoperability and inter-agency co-operation, providing schemes for 14 management characteristics related to: incident command, operations, communication, planning, logistics, finance and administration and intelligence and investigation.

Management objectives and action planning are centralised in a single unit of command to prevent diverging orders and promote accountability to a unified command and reporting institution. In this way agencies are able to respond to emergencies in a cost-effective and co-ordinated manner, which permits the development of mutual objectives and strategies. At the same time, the ICS is flexible enough to be implemented for all kinds of incidents, large or small.

To ensure effective communication, a common inter-agency terminology was developed. Moreover, information exchange is facilitated by Public Information Officers who are in permanent contact with the Incident Command Organization and the Safety Officer. Forest Service, with their partner response agencies in Southern California, examined the incident management efforts. They discovered the following issues:. Forest Service to develop a system to improve the capabilities of wildland fire response agencies to effectively coordinate multiagency, multijurisdictional response.

It should be noted that at the beginning of this work, despite the recognition that there were incident or field level shortfalls in organization and terminology, there was no mention of the need to develop an on-the-ground incident management system like ICS. Most of the efforts were focused on the multiagency coordination challenges above the incident or field level. The principles included:. Part 1 was further broken down into three sub-parts. Mission Research Corporation and System Development Corporation, A conceptual definition of a wildland fire management regional coordination system, But where did the idea for this colorful system come from?

It came from the French military. One of the management tools they observed in the European Theater was T-Cards. Today, there are several software applications that perform the same function, but T-Cards are still a valuable and effective means of tracking resources. LFO had been developed after World War II by returning veterans who applied their military command and control experience to wildland fire management. While LFO bore some resemblance to military command and control, it was specifically adapted to wildland fire management and bears no direct linkage.

As an incident management system, LFO was capable of expanding to incorporate multiple agencies, but its downfall was it lacked a strong central coordinating mechanism. This was one of the shortcomings exposed during the fire season. While several areas of LFO proved inadequate to the complex incident management demands of the fire season, other components worked well and were retained in the new system development.

Including wildland fire response and experience with LFO, the group had experience with systems engineering, business management, public safety administration, and military service.

Throughout their individual careers, the group members had been influenced by various business management practices and principles. In many cases, they subconsciously incorporated these concepts into the system development.

Other management concepts, such as Span of Control, were considered and included as well. Due to the diverse backgrounds of the group, it is hard to point to anyone experience or model that influenced the development of the system. In the end, the system became an amalgamation of several different experiences, theories, and models, as well as considerable compromise. While the group worked to develop the principle-level components of the system, a parallel effort focused on the details related to policies, procedures, and integration of facilities and equipment necessary to operate the system.

This provided the basis for a comprehensive organizational structure that incorporated the functional requirements for managing the system. The outlined requirements specified that the organization be able to provide resource status monitoring, situation assessment, logistics, communications, lines of decision making, and the ability to meet operational needs. Based upon these requirements, the system created five key functions that had not existed before: situation assessment, status keeping, resource utilization, logistics management, and housekeeping e.

These functions were incorporated into the original system organization chart. By the functional framework for the modern-day ICS organization had been developed. Like the ICS organization chart today, it consisted of Command, Planning, Logistics, and Finance, all with sub-units with specific functional responsibilities. The one change is Operations. From the original ICS organization as developed in to the ICS organization we have today, we see a few, but not many, changes to that basic concept.

These concepts have stood the test of time and countless responses. Concurrent with this release was the publication of a corresponding Operations Manual that detailed each of the positions in the system and the generic operating procedures. Shortly after publication of these documents, the name of the system was changed from Field Command Operations System to the Incident Command System in June of Members of the development Task Force opted for the name change because they preferred to put the emphasis on the Incident rather than the System.

Why are ICS forms numbered something?