INTRODUCTION
On September 11, 2001, emergency responders in New York City, Arlington, Virginia and Somerset County Pennsylvania became warriors. For many, this ordination was not by choice, for many others it was done without their knowledge.
There are important lessons that we must take to heart as we prepare for responding to our next emergency. While it is true that these lessons come from incidents that were of such magnitude that it could only occur in an area like a New York or a Washington D.C. metropolitan area, the lessons are still applicable to all emergency responders. The fact remains that each of these incidents involved local, state and federal response assets and required these assets to work in cooperation with one another. We must learn from these incidents to better prepare ourselves for our own responses.
There are incidents that can and do overwhelm those response assets in other jurisdictions on a seemingly regular basis. These types of events happen with and without a terrorist attack. The next incident could be an F-5 tornado in Kansas City, Missouri; a natural outbreak of a highly pathogenic animal disease in Amarillo; a 100-year flood in Cincinnati; or a hazardous materials incident in Burlington, Vermont.
Knowing this, the after action reports from events in Oklahoma City, New York and Arlington, VA provide us with some very important lessons. This article will address some of the relative points.
- Working knowledge and proper implementation of the incident management or incident command system is essential to surviving any incident, particularly an incident of the magnitude of the terrorist attacks n 9-11-01.
- Cross training, particularly in the incident command/management system, is essential to the safety of emergency responders.
USE OF THE INCIDENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
There are many terms and acronyms used to describe a system that emergency responders use to deal with the extreme needs of an emergency situation. Whether you use ICS or IMS, FIRESCOPE
