When was nims created

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. 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.

This write-up is for informational purposes only and does not follow standard scholarly or academic research and citation procedures. We recommend that if you are conducting academic research you consult primary sources or contact us for clarification. Joseph Barbera and Ms. Kimberly Stambler from George Washington University. Those two systems were the:. The impetus for the development of these systems was the disastrous and devastating fire season in Southern California.

At the time, the sky was full of giant smoke columns and fire apparatus were passing each other on their way to incidents, with some going north as others headed south. Individual Command Posts and fire camps were established by multiple agencies for the same incident.

Response resource availabilities reached critically low levels. The number of fires burning at the same time taxed the organizational capability to protect lives, property, and the environment, especially where wilderness bordered urban communities, creating a dangerous wildland-urban interface. As part of the after-action review, the U. 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.

The efficient use of resources. However, ICS is a field-based tactical communications system, whereas NIMS provides a system for managing the event at the local, operational area, region and state levels. ICS is widespread in use from law enforcement to every-day business, as the basic goals of clear communication, accountability, and the efficient use of resources are common to incident and emergency management as well as daily operations.

A: Everyone involved in emergency management to include emergency operation center personnel in support of the field , regardless of discipline or level of government, should take the NIMS baseline curriculum courses Independent Study and ICS An incident management system is a combination of equipment, personnel, procedures and communications that work together in an emergency to react, understand and respond. Each of the four factors is necessary in order for an incident management system to be effective.

Terms in this set 13 common terminology. Incident Command System. ICS can be used by businesses to work together with public agencies during emergencies. Although FIRESCOPE ICS was originally developed to assist in the response to wildland fires, it was quickly recognized as a system that could help public safety responders provide effective and coordinated incident management for a wide range of situations, including floods, hazardous materials accidents, earthquakes.

When was Nims established? Category: news and politics disasters. This system directs the creation of a comprehensive, national approach to incident management by federal, state, territorial, Tribal and local responders. How was Nims created? Who uses NIMS? What's FEMA stand for?