Why was nims formed

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. Figure 8. The preceding pages have covered the factors that affect NIMS implementation in the transportation sector. Figure 9 presents a graphical representation of inter-relationships revealed both by the review of literature about NIMS implementation and by the exploratory interviews conducted for this study.

This diagram characterizes the variables as internal and external factors and shows how they affect NIMS implementation. Future research should test whether this representation holds for a broader sample of transportation agencies and if it could extend to other second and third circle professions and agencies.

The fact that all agencies interviewed have implemented NIMS to some degree and have plans to or expressed an interest in further developing their NIMS programs are indications that NIMS is becoming embedded in the transportation sector and will help it contribute to the multi-disciplinary incident management system that the nation needs to respond to complex disasters. Quite importantly, the lack of clarity in NIMS compliance standards for transportation agencies — and the consequent uncertainty for those agencies about which compliance-related areas to focus their time and resources on — has led to inconsistent implementation efforts, most notably with respect to training.

Doing so would provide more authoritative support for the transportation-tailored training and guidance documents already in existence and would send clearer signals to transportation agencies at the city, metro, and state levels, making it easier for emergency management specialists in these agencies to advocate for enhanced agency-wide commitment to NIMS. Clearer standards for transportation might also increase the degree to which transportation agencies are integrated with first response agencies in NIMS implementation.

In designing NIMS implementation programs, policy makers should take account of the differences between first, second, and third circle response agencies, particularly the non-emergency-focused missions of second and third circle groups. These affect the time and resources these organizations devote to NIMS implementation. Simplifying NIMS may also have the added benefit of increasing the frequency with which it is utilized by transportation agencies. For transportation agencies to use NIMS as effectively as possible during incident responses, they must engage with it on a regular basis to develop and sustain proficiency.

Many fire departments, for example, use ICS on all responses, whether minor or major, in order to build proficiency and confidence in using the system. Employing NIMS only during multi-agency incident responses, as some of the transportation groups interviewed reported, may be insufficient for second and third circle agencies to develop proficiency and be truly ready to mesh with other response organizations under the severe pressures of a major emergency.

It should be the goal of these organizations to use NIMS on all incident responses and as consistently as possible when emergencies are not occurring through drills, exercises, and other mechanisms. Simplification is one way of increasing the likelihood that second and third circle responders will use NIMS. But flexibility to customize NIMS — to adapt it to the operating circumstances of particular professions or services — is also important to second and third circle responders.

Transit agencies, in particular, which tend to maintain command within their transit control centers during incidents instead of on-scene as espoused by NIMS, rely on this flexibility to carry out their emergency response operations effectively. With that said, over-customization of NIMS by agencies can lead to an inability to integrate with others during incidents. The issue of customization thus creates a major tension.

At its root, NIMS makes sense in order to prepare responders in all of the circles for major emergencies that require them to operate effectively in concert. That level of collaboration requires common systems that allow personnel from different organizations and professional disciplines to interact under great pressure when the stakes are very high.

But under ordinary circumstances, that level of collaboration is frequently unnecessary; response organizations often can operate independently or with relatively low need for integrated action. The greatest need for NIMS proficiency comes under truly extraordinary conditions. Thus, on one hand, thoughtful customization allows NIMS to adapt to the operating requirements of different agencies and professions and makes the system more palatable, particularly to second and third circle organizations; on the other hand, sufficient standardization across professions is required to ensure that the basic premise of NIMS — collaboration through a common incident management framework — is achieved.

There is no simple resolution to this dilemma, but it should be explicitly confronted by local and state emergency management agencies and their collaborators such as transportation agencies. If that link is not apparent, agency leaders are not likely to commit time, energy, and internal political capital to building NIMS capacity, and agency staff are much less likely to treat NIMS proficiency as a significant personal or organizational goal, resulting in incomplete penetration of NIMS within the agency, which was the case in some of the transportation agencies interviewed.

Minimal commitment is highly likely to result in reduced capability in times of stress. But this requires emergency managers within transportation agencies to manage up by convincing senior leadership of the risks their agencies face and to manage across by finding ways to persuade managers in other divisions of the agency of the importance and priority of emergency preparedness.

Drills, exercises, after action reviews, threat and hazard vulnerability assessments, and perhaps other initiatives can clearly illustrate the costs of inaction and, as importantly, the benefits to mission continuity that come from investments in NIMS implementation. But these are not self-evident propositions in agencies whose major mission is not emergency preparedness and response. Finally, transportation agencies must find alternative ways of funding their NIMS-related efforts.

Nor is grant funding intended to be a permanent solution to the sustainability of NIMS within the transportation sector. Transportation agencies must dedicate internal funding; and, since internal funding is likely to be limited, they must also find creative, low-cost ways to maintain NIMS proficiency through cost-sharing activities like conducting joint exercises with external partners and combining NIMS trainings with other professional training programs.

Transportation agencies have made important strides in NIMS implementation. But more work remains. Nicholas received his B. He is currently an M. Arnold M. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. PCL conducts research, executive education programs, and action projects. Among other writings, Dr.

Howitt received his B. David W. He previously served as a staff researcher at the National Academies and received his B. Those who died, both the heroic rescuers and the innocent victims, are immortalized in myriad ways and will be long remembered in song, in art and in special monuments. This new approach will make America safer and our emergency response more effective, which is a goal of the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5.

So what is NIMS and how will this new system affect you? Quite simply, NIMS establishes standard incident management processes, protocols and procedures so that all responders — including those at the federal, state, tribal and local level — can coordinate their response actions.

By using this same standardized procedure, responders will share a common focus and be able to place full emphasis on resolving the event. The response community will be united as never before with practices developed and proven in the past and vetted by emergency representatives from all sectors of the country.

This should be reassuring for those of you who have been using this system for years. We know that ICS works. The principles of unified command have also been incorporated into NIMS to ensure joint decision making in multi-jurisdictional events.

Another key feature of NIMS includes communication and information management. Responders and managers across all agencies, professions and jurisdictions must have a common operating picture for a more efficient and effective response. The Joint Information System also incorporates preparedness, including planning, training, exercises and certification. 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? Development documents and notes were filed away in series, The series was established for common forms, The series for training documents, and The series for ICS guides. While the intent in was for ICS to be used to manage all wildland fire field activities for the fire service, the design intent of the system almost immediately evolved into an all-risk, all-hazard system.

It did not make sense to have different systems for different types of incidents. By , the focus began to unofficially shift into the development of an all-risk, all-hazard system that could be used to manage an incident of any nature. During this time period, some of the fire-specific references were removed from the system, including the Suppression and Rescue Section, and replaced with more generic references, such as the Operations Section.

This is a significant fact that is lost on many incident response and emergency management personnel: ICS has been an all-risk, all-hazard system since its original development.

While ICS was developed to solve the incident-level management challenges, MACS was developed to address the off-site coordination issues above the incident level.

Designed in conjunction with ICS to be an independent yet interrelated system, MACS is an equally critical component of successful incident management. The original OCC experiment demonstrated continued difficulties in obtaining timely and accurate information about the incident and resource status.

Based upon the initial experiments and a major design study, more detailed functional specifications, personnel, and facility considerations for MACS and OCCs were published in An interesting side story captured by Dr. The contrast between the management of multiagency coordination in MACS versus command authority of ICS was never more apparent than during the fire season. But it was the way it worked and he was really impressed with that.

When he got back, we had 5 Army Colonels come to see what Mondale saw. It was the process and series of forms. Forest Service in Trained as a wildland firefighter with a degree in Forestry, he progressed through the agency.

By the conceptual definition and organizational structure of ICS was relatively well defined. The system had been examined through a rigorous exercise conducted at the California Specialized Training Institute at Camp San Luis Obispo in late and shortly thereafter, the Los Angeles City Fire Department began to test parts of the system as a means of validation.

It is known that elements of ICS were used in on the Occidental Tower high-rise fire in Los Angeles, demonstrating that even from the beginning, ICS applicability was greater than simply wildland fire incidents. The original implementation plan recommended evaluating the systems in a designated geographic area. The implementation plan for the MACS also included developing more robust operational procedures for MACS and subsequently training personnel in those procedures. To accommodate the influx on responders not familiar with the new system, just-in-time training was set up to educate them on ICS.

While ICS demonstrated effectiveness, according to Chuck Mills the system was not initially as successful as anticipated for the following reasons:. Due in large part to these reasons, after a few days of experimenting with ICS, management of the Pacoima Fire shifted back to using the old LFO system. By use of ICS was common in Southern California by major fire agencies and its usage for non-fire incidents was growing. While the U. As the use of ICS by the fire service gradually extended across the US, even non-fire agencies were investigating ICS and working to incorporate it into their response procedures.

To meet this requirement, many communities began to adopt ICS. ICS expansion within the fire service discipline was further encouraged when National Fire Protection Association standard was revised in , requiring all fire departments to establish procedures for the use of ICS.

Many people ask what the first non-fire incident to be managed using ICS. Unfortunately that piece of trivia has been lost to history, but with early adoption by Los Angeles City Fire Department for all response, one can easy imagine that ICS must have been used on a search and rescue, flood, or hazardous materials incident in the late s.

Additionally, with ICS proliferating throughout Southern California it is likely that early on there was a law enforcement incident that was managed using ICS. One of the first national organizations to adopt ICS outside of the wildland fire community was the U. Coast Guard.