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Is a beast with one "I" better than a beast with two?

My first attempt at this column began with a list of all my department's endeavors to obtain the Holy Grail of incident management — the coveted "NIMS compliance." This included defining the five types of incident operations described in NIMS and the National Response Plan, and a review of the professional qualifications for the incident-management positions required by NIMS. Rather than bore you with a bunch of bureaucratic B.S., I will take this opportunity to howl at the moon and blow off some federally generated steam.

Every single fire department in the US of A must be NIMS compliant at some date that keeps getting moved back. Once the final date is final, the feds can withhold all federal funding from states whose counties, cities, towns and villages refuse to comply with the NIMS mandate. This not only includes federal grants and other federal giveaway programs, but also highly coveted federal highway funding, which is serious money. Our federal NIMS masters are a freaky 12-headed hybrid of the EPA, IRS and FBI — all in the name of IMS. (The federal government loves acronyms so we had all better get used to them.)

For those of you who have led pure and wholesome lives and don't know what about NIMS, it's the federally mandated National Incident Management System. NIMS was born in February 2002 when our supreme leader, George W. Bush, signed a presidential order directing someone in the federal government to devise an incident management system for the entire country. I love metaphors, so here goes: The president decides he wants to give every American 1 gallon of the finest applesauce ever produced. He calls his cabinet together and shares his grand applesauce vision, assigning responsibility to a newly appointed applesauce czar. The president tells the applesauce czar that he has one year to deliver a gallon of top-end applesauce in red, white and blue buckets to each American. Knowing nothing about applesauce, the applesauce czar directs his 500-person staff (who also know nothing about applesauce) to meet with every concrete company in the country to develop a formula for applesauce.

The presidential NIMS order has set incident command in the structural fire service back at least a decade; we are now rehashing debates that occurred more than 10 years ago. To create NIMS, the feds simply adopted the decades-old National Interagency Incident Management System (NIIMS), added a cover page and a lot of federal gobbledy-gook and renamed it the National Incident Management System (NIMS). The original NIIMS has become known as "two I'ed NIIMS" and federal NIMS is now lovingly referred to as "one I'ed NIMS."

Decades before President Bush mandated federal NIMS, there were two different IMS systems in American fire service: NIIMS (which was based on FIRESCOPE, the FIrefighting RESources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies) and Fire Command. The most notable difference between these two systems is that Fire Command refers to tactical subdivisions as "sectors," and NIIMS calls them "divisions" and "groups." In my mind, this whole NIMS thing isn't a matter of using either Fire Command or NIIMS, because the systems complement one another. This is where the feds really screwed things up. Any moron can scream that something is broken, so in keeping with FireRescue's "Read it today, become an expert tomorrow, then land a high-ranking job with FEMA" philosophy, here is closure to the long running Fire Command-NIIMS debate and a simple solution for our federal IMS masters.

Order out of Chaos
NIIMS is truly an ICS. It was developed to bring together dozens of different fire departments, thousands of responders, and myriad other private, local, state and federal agencies at very large incidents, such as large wildfires. It was originally developed to include a huge logistical effort, manage a large aircraft component and track the costs associated with incident. NIIMS creates a temporary government to manage long-standing incident control-and-recovery undertakings. NIIMS is the logical backend model for NIMS.

Despite what NIIMS advocates claim, NIIMS does not do the same thing that Fire Command does. Some may argue that NIIMS is scalable and all-risk, but it was never intended to serve as the day-to-day incident command system for fire departments any more than Fire Command was designed to manage a Category 5 hurricane that impacts seven states. Fire Command has evolved into a hazard-zone management system. Fire Command's ongoing intent is to manage both service delivery (rescue, fire control and property conservation) and safety of the hazard-zone workers in real time. NIIMS incident accountability is performed on paper and tracks incident resources for cost recovery. Fire Command accountability allows the incident commander to know the position and function of all assigned resources. This type of worker accountability is designed around a 20-minute air supply in a burning building. Fifteen minutes is usually beyond the halfway point of a Fire Command operation. Fifteen minutes of a NIIMS event is merely a quarter of an hour.

We use Fire Command to manage day-to-day incidents (Types 4 & 5 as defined by NIMS) and anytime our members operate in or around a hazard zone. NIMS is used for large-scale, long-duration incidents (Types 1, 2 and 3 as defined by NIMS). These systems fit together quite nicely, as was proven during our department's two-week US&R deployment after Hurricane Katrina. The team managed their day-to-day rescue operations using our department's regular Fire Command system. Our team leaders reported to FEMA within the NIMS. This really wasn't that big a deal. Our team (just like all of the other teams) operated in very harsh conditions for a couple of weeks (conditions that killed alligators and other very hardy reptiles). All of our team members came home without sustaining a single injury. They were able to pull this off because they operate within a structured hazard-zone management system every day. Our US&R team used the same hazard-zone management system they would use at a structure fire in Phoenix when operating in Louisiana, Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center.

In my mind, NIMS is the management system a Type 1 overhead team uses to manage the full scope of a big-deal incident. This includes managing all the various hazard-zone teams within that operation. Each hazard-zone team is managed by the set of bosses they showed up with. When our troops leave town to help someone else's hazard operations, we send a command team with them. Our command team will use our locally developed and refined hazard-zone management system to protect our workers. NIMS serves as the big system we all work within, and Fire Command is the system we use to tightly manage he task-level work and worker safety. Example: An overall incident includes 20 separate hazard-zone operations. A single, unified, all-encompassing grand Pooh-Bah command runs the entire incident, while the 20 separate hazard zone operations are managed with their own command teams (or operations teams, semi-Pooh-Bahs, or whatever else the federal government wants to call them).

Early on in the NIMS process, the feds decided to deal directly with states, limiting the fed's number of customers to 50. This makes each state the "middle man" between the feds and every municipal fire department. The upside of this arrangement is the states and their cities have to figure out how to work together and manage Type 3 events, as well as Type 1s and 2s. On the downside, it places another layer of bureaucracy between cities and the ultimate NIMS authority.

The federal government has only been in the incident-command business for a few years. Based solely on their federal authority, they are now the experts. Many of the people providing advanced NIMS training have never managed an incident; some of them have never been to an incident. No one knew what to expect when this first got started, and initially, a lot of the federal NIMS representatives said the federal government didn't care what local fire departments did IMS-wise for local operations. Today, the feds are saying they still have no interest in local operations, but whatever we do on the local level must match up with what the feds do for Type 1 and 2 events. In the end, this may simply mean that NIIMS purists (wildland fire folks) have convinced the federal government to finally remove the word "sector" from the structural firefighting dictionary.

The federalization does not end there. In typical government fashion, NIMS really doesn't cause many incident responders to do anything differently, so there's really no need to fuss. For your state to receive federal highway funds, your local fire department, law-enforcement agency and public-works departments must be NIMS compliant by a certain date. But what about fire departments (or other incident responders) that don't use an IMS? If a department gets all their members trained via the required NIMS classes, they become NIMS compliant. This same fire department can continue using an out-of-control approach for daily operations. Since most fire departments will never operate at the scene of anything larger than a Type 4 or 5 event, the federal government will consider that department NIMS compliant because their lack of a day-to-day system doesn't conflict with anything in NIMS. On the very remote possibility this same fire department does operate at a Type 1, 2 or 3 event, all they have to do is report to the right supervisor and run amok within the NIMS system. This creates a situation where organizations that have been effectively using IMS for decades must rework parts of their systems that don't need reworking, while organizations that don't currently use any type of management system can continue to deliver mediocre local service while exposing their members to unnecessary hazards.

Most Type 1 overhead teams are experts at managing large wildland fires. They do this better than anyone. The problem these current teams face is many of the incidents NIMS was created to manage are more urban in nature. These incidents include acts of terrorism in urban settings, natural disasters and epidemics/pandemics. Managing a burning forest does not qualify someone to manage a large explosion in the middle of a big city or figure out what to do when the people in your community start getting the bird flu. In the end, local responders will have to deal with these incidents well before federal help arrives.

Over the course of my career, I've noticed that when an incident begins well, it ends well. I have yet to read a firefighter fatality report that stated everything was going really well right up until the time Charlie got killed. This same truth applies to all incidents, regardless of size. Every year, Florida gets pounded by hurricanes. The country watches the news coverage, amazed by the wrath and power of nature. We also tip our hats to the effectiveness of Florida's emergency responders. This is a result of having local resources hooked together on the state level. The feds typically come in and support what is already in place and working. Compare this to the aberration that was Hurricane Katrina.

If the federal government is sincere about getting the American fire service to operate within a single system, we need another solution; NIMS falls woefully short. If the goal is to have all of us work together in times of extreme crisis, we need to work together on a day-to-day basis. Mandating each fire department to run automatic aid with each fire department on its borders would do more to unite the fire service in one week than NIMS has done in three years. If nothing else, it would be fun to watch.

Nick Brunacini has been with the Phoenix (Ariz.) Fire Department since 1980 and has served as a firefighter, captain, battalion chief and shift commander. Brunacini helped develop the "Fire Command" and "Command Safety — Saving Our Own" curricula packages. He has been an instructor at Phoenix College since 1990.