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. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
The authors are grateful to Christine Cole, Frances Edwards, and David Janvosky for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. The views expressed here are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsoring institutions or any reviewer. Neal and Gary R. We asked general questions with increasingly detailed follow-ups that were not part of a structured interview protocol but which instead pursued the specific points that the initial queries suggested.
Howitt and Herman B. Edwards and Daniel C. McDaniel et al. Lutz and Michael K. Robinson and Brian J. ESFs, which align with ICS, were developed within the field of emergency management as a way to group organizations with similar functional capabilities in order to improve the delivery of emergency services and the management of resources.
Even though second circle responders are not in the inner circle, they have closer ties to first responders through their ESF designations and, therefore, may have an easier time implementing NIMS than third circle responders. Balong, Annabelle Boyd, and James E. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Wallace et al. Nakanishi and Pierre M. Buck, Joseph E. Trainor, and Benigno E. Dunaway and Gregory L.
Homeland Security Affairs is an academic journal available free of charge to individuals and institutions. Because the purpose of this publication is the widest possible dissemination of knowledge, copies of this journal and the articles contained herein may be printed or downloaded and redistributed for personal, research or educational purposes free of charge and without permission.
Any commercial use of Homeland Security Affairs or the articles published herein is expressly prohibited without the written consent of the copyright holder. The copyright of all articles published in Homeland Security Affairs rests with the author s of the article. Great academic exploration of the application of NIMS to ground transportation industries. I just completed and defended the research for my Doctoral Dissertation at the University of Baltimore regarding the relationship between public transportation and HSPD-5, and whether public transportation agencies are the forgotten element in NIMS.
My research measured the attitudes of transit managers in regards to this important subject, using a concurrent mixed-methods design that also included a case study of the model used by WMATA. The results were quite interesting, and illustrated that this is definitely an area that requires deeper research by academia and practitioners alike. Skip to content. Giles Abstract For more than a decade, the National Incident Management System NIMS has served in the United States as the mandated framework for coordinated organization, operational command, and implementation of response to emergencies nationwide.
Suggested Citation Nicholas B. Figure 3. Compliance requirements and enforcement — Federal preparedness funding for states and localities, as discussed above, is now contingent upon NIMS compliance , although FEMA has required only state-level self-certification.
Conversely, when persons or groups believe that a risk is likely to affect them, they are more likely to take action to prevent or prepare for it.
Therefore, helping organizations in the outer circles better understand their risks is a primary step in influencing action. The Federal Government has begun to put greater emphasis on risk assessments as part of the National Preparedness Goal 47 and National Preparedness System.
Without the commitment of executive leadership within these organizations to fund and support emergency planning and preparedness initiatives, NIMS implementation is much less likely.
While there are varying opinions on whether or not NIMS is designed to accommodate this flexibility, adaptation of NIMS at the organizational level seems to be an important condition for successful NIMS implementation by second and third circle organizations. Collaboration with first responders — A number of articles discuss the benefits that pre-incident collaboration between emergency response groups brings, whether it be in planning, training, exercising, etc. Those second and third circle groups that are able to maintain these close linkages are more likely to be successful in emergency planning and NIMS implementation efforts.
Consistency of use — Infrequent utilization of NIMS is another obstacle to full implementation by outer circle responders. Figure 5. Figure 9. Which departments are responsible for which aspects? How many staff and what are their roles? External Emergency Management Partnerships: Can you overview the emergency management community in your area? Which organizations are most involved? With whom does your agency collaborate most closely? Do you view NIMS as primarily the emergency response structure ICS or other components as well planning, preparedness, resource management, etc.
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. Why the good practice was developed The United States has developed incident command systems ICS in various institutions since the s, in order to manage and organise emergency response. 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. At the same time ICS was spreading through structural and wildland fire response communities in the s, the U. Coast Guard struggled with managing multiagency response operations. Following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in March , the Coast Guard began to look at how to better integrate its efforts into overall state and local government.
If one looked at the after-action report from the Valdez incident, he or she could find many of the same issues that surfaced during the fires in the s. Coast Guard personnel realized that, although managing wildland fires was pretty far removed from typical Coast Guard mission areas, the process used had many similarities to the response challenges the Coast Guard often faced.
For example:. In the early s Coast Guard members started a grassroots effort to use ICS, and the seed was planted. Like an incoming tide, ICS use within the Coast Guard throughout the s touched every corner of the service. Clair River system in Michigan. Throughout the Coast Guard responders recognized the value of the system in bringing order to chaos right from the outset of an incident.
It soon became a matter of routine at some Coast Guard units, even for small-scale responses. In a Commandant instruction directed ICS use for oil and hazardous materials response and, in , another instruction required ICS use for all-hazards response.
Coast Guard ICS adoption and implementation took off in the early s with a robust training program. The September 11th terrorist attacks highlighted the need for a national approach to incident management.
In response to observations and lessons learned from September 11th, President Bush issued HSPD-5, directing the development of a single, national incident management system. After years of successful application as not only useful tools for managing wildland fires but all-risk, all-hazard incidents, these two systems became the national standard. NIMS implementation continues today. Many of these challenges are similar to those experienced in the lates and s during the national implementation of ICS in the wildland fire community.
ICS has proven not only useful for managing U. While it has been principally used by fire and land management agencies, there has been increasing recognition of the benefits of a coordinated public safety approach to incident management involving all of the emergency service providers.
During heavy wildland fire seasons, the U.
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