Incident Command System | 09.28.2006 | 05:36:56 | Views: 4974 | ID: September 28 '06: An evaluation of the Incident Command System and the National Incident Management System by the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management has appeared in brief on the Metropolitan Medical Response System's website, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security. In its findings, the article found that the ICS "is a partial solution to the question of how to organize the societal response in the aftermath of disasters; the system is more or less effective depending on specific characteristics of the incident and the organizations in which it is used." Additionally, because ICS is not a "universally applicable bureaucratic organization among responders," it has become more of a "mechanism for inter-organizational coordination designed to impose order on certain dimensions" of an emergency or disaster. ICS was originally developed after wildfire emergencies in California required state and local officials to cooperate during emergencies in order to share information, logistics and develop strategies for combatting the blazes which occurred annually and with sometimes catastrophic results. By the early 1980s, the ICS was used by most local and regional officials in the state. The ICS' goal on a national level is to provide and facilitate the implementation of the National Incident Management System - a system that "represents a core set of doctrine, principles, terminology, and organizational processes to enable effective, efficient and collaborative incident management at all levels," a FEMA website read. The Journal's conclusion found that the use of NIMS through ICS may not be the intended one because of its failure to homogenize the response method and to use ICS "as a comprehensive principle" disaster management tool.
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