National Incident Management System

National Incident Management

Richard Hutto

Florida State College of Jacksonville

Introduction

        The world will always be a dangerous unpredictable place. No matter how safe people feel or think that they are, there is always the possibility for a disaster to happen. Our government spends millions of dollars each year in order to keep the terrorist security threats to a minimum. They also use state of the art equipment to predict things such as hurricanes, severe weather and tornados. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001 the United States has spent 7.6 trillion dollars on homeland security and defense (National Priorities). Actual homeland security spending has totaled 636 billion dollars (National Priorities). The government created a system to handle the many different disasters that may be encountered in our country and other countries. This system is called the National Incident Management System. Throughout this course I have expanded my knowledge of how national incidents are managed. After four weeks of learning about the management process there are three main topics that I find are key when learning about incident management.  Although NIMS is the heart and soul of national incident management, the Incident Command System, the planning section and the administration and finance section of NIMS is what makes everything functional.

National Incident Management System

        The National Incident Management System was a system created in order to better organize the management of disasters. Before NIMS, jurisdictions and organizations were not working together in the best way possible, and they were not following all of the procedures the same way. This was causing the incident scene to become more hectic then it already was. NIMS was designed to restructure and standardize the emergency management system (National Incident Management System). Federal, state, territory, tribal and local government were forced to implement this new system into their emergency management systems (Jensen, 2011).  NIMS was created shortly after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (Jensen, 2011). NIMS is a very effective system for emergency management. It will help in the communication and the cooperating with other agencies when working a large disaster.

Implementation of NIMS

The Department of Homeland Security mandated NIMS in 2004 (Walsh, 2012). Jurisdictions from top to bottom were forced to implement this system in order to make disaster management as effective as possible. By 2006 all levels of jurisdiction were required to have the National Incident Management System implemented (Lester, 2007). To make sure that the right measures are taken, the National Integration Center determines the pace at which jurisdictions implement NIMS (Walsh, 2012). The expectations of implementation are instructed to each jurisdiction annually (Walsh, 2012). This way agencies know what is expected of them. Every year states and territories are requires to report their compliance with NIMS (Jensen, 2011). This is done to make sure that NIMS is being carried out correctly. As of 2007 states and territories are now tracked through the NIMS Compliance Assistance and Support Tool (Siven, 2010). Local level and county managers are required to file with NIMCAST each year and then forward it to their state department (National Incident Management System). One flaw has been seen with this system.