BY BILL MANNING
On the heels of the FIRE Act grant program travesty, federal officials are gearing up to take another shot at the fire service. In the name of Homeland Security, the feds, in draconian fashion, have hatched a scheme to force thousands of American fire departments to change their local incident command systems to one National Incident Management System (NIMS).
For purposes of federal emergency response agency coordination, the choice of the National Fire Academy-approved, FIRESCOPE-based NIMS makes perfect sense. But it’s sheer lunacy, born of institutional arrogance, for the federal bureaucrats to insist that local fire departments change their command systems in anticipation of a potential visit from the feds 24 hours into the Big One.
The FIRESCOPE system, developed for wildland fire response, is a proven, valuable management tool for large, slowly expanding multiagency incidents where immediate life loss is not necessarily a strategic issue. It works great for responding to the aftereffects of Hurricane Isabel. Most fire departments have found it’s not particularly suited for those moments when a well-developed high-rise fire is driving people to windows on the 7th and 8th floors of a residential high-rise. It’s not particularly suited for the urban crisis management mode.
That is exactly the reason most urban and suburban fire departments don’t use it. Most urban/suburban fire departments use the Fireground Command System (FCS) or a variation of it, or if not (for all the East Coasters), a long-evolved system whose basic principles and form served as the foundation for the more formalized (if somewhat different) FCS. The reason these systems work for local fire departments is that when you pull up to a house fire at 2 a.m., there’s no time or need for a logistics or finance officer, just a need for surviving and creating as large an envelope as possible for citizens to survive. FCS and other similarly proven management systems practiced by most fire departments are crisis-mode systems that facilitate rapid, coordinated tactics with minimal procedural fuss and within a simple strategic context. It’s 9-1-1 mode.
Whatever and wherever the next terrorist strike may be, it will be a local incident, and like all the other severe incidents you face, you’ll be operating in 9-1-1 crisis mode. Even so, the current command systems in operation in cities and towns throughout the country have proven themselves flexible and expandable enough to handle the largest campaign-type incidents.
The Washingtonians don’t appear to have given this much thought. They want to create a national NIMS certification system—like the “red card” certification system for wildland firefighting—with the goal of credentialing all American firefighters in the “new NIMS.” So we’d invest millions of dollars certifying hundreds of thousands of firefighters and fire officers in a system that most don’t use or need. And if you’re not certified, it means you’re not qualified. Imagine the scene when the federal overhead team swaggers into town 24 hours into the incident and informs the fire chief that he’s not holding the right card to manage the job.
Well-placed federal employees are suggesting that federal funding to local fire departments be tied to participation (that is, certification) in the “new NIMS.” Meaning you won’t get the FIRE grant or terrorism funding you need to upgrade response capabilities to protect your community unless you can speak federalese to the white knights who ride into town during the recovery phase to order more body bags and establish the hydration sector—oops, I mean, hydration division.
To say that these folks are missing the point demeans our appreciation for the absurd.
Federal response agencies should be talking the same language, and firefighters should be educated and conversant in the “new NIMS.” But the feds have turned it upside down. Who’s supporting whom? It’s federal elitism at its finest.
Maybe we’re being too hard on the bureaucrats. After all, within the context of Washington’s Homeland Security hysteria and public opinion polls, it can’t be easy living the reality that the federal emergency response system is not a crisis management-phase system.
Do they think Joe Citizen cares if the local response agencies are using a federally approved command system so they can speak federalese to the recovery-mode cavalry when it arrives the day after the Big One? He only cares that the local and nearby mutual-aid agencies can work together in some way to save him and his neighbors. Any command system that works in those first terrible hours will do.
Maybe instead of changing 30,000 fire organizations and insisting that 500,000 urban-suburban firefighters be certified to fight wildland fires, the feds should think about hiring people who can make the extraordinary mental leap between “sector” and “division” and “side 1” and “side A.”
Reconstructing command systems nationwide is beyond absurd—it’s criminal. It makes me want to know who on the fire side would recommend this to our brainy bureaucrats, and for what self-serving purposes. I have a bucket of tar and a few bags of feathers at the ready.
In response to this lunacy, Chief Alan Brunacini, father of the Fireground Command System (which, as far as I know, is still working pretty well in Phoenix) has proposed a “blue card” system to “credential” their firefighters who regularly practice their art within a “non-federally approved,” urban-type IMS. This idea is catching on.
As for me, I’ll agree with Chief Bobby Halton of Albuquerque when he says, “I don’t think the terrorists have their sights on Yogi and BooBoo in Jellystone Park” and side with the blue-card firefighters—you know, the crisis-mode experts who’ll be operating in the middle of the unfolding, life-threatening ugliness when the terrorists once again manage to hit their targets.
