The Homeland Security Department's National Incident Management System (NIMS) aims to help public officials prevent, prepare for and respond to natural and man-made disasters. Its primary purpose is to establish common practices, capabilities and resources — including information and communications systems — so that officials can easily coordinate efforts.
NIMS covers six areas:
Command and management The Incident Command System, which firefighters use nationwide and which forms the basis for NIMS. Multiple-agency coordinating systems, covering everything from common policies to common terminology. Public information systems, to be used to communicate with the public during an incident.
Preparedness, planning and strategies. Training through standard courses. Exercises that local, regional and national agency officials conduct regularly. Personnel qualification and certification. Equipment acquisition and certification. Mutual aid agreements. Publications management, including standardization of forms and policies for handling sensitive documents.
Resource management. The ability to describe, inventory, mobilize, dispatch, track and recover resources throughout the duration of an incident.
Communications and information management Incident command communications. Information management to ensure that information is getting to the people who need it, when they need it.
Supporting technologies. Voice and data communications, information and resource management systems, and other equipment.
Policy management. Ongoing management and maintenance of the system's policies at DHS.
Source: Homeland Security Department
Cooperation during emergencies is as fundamental as the need for quick action. Increasingly, first responders are prepared to work together in the event of an emergency, and now Homeland Security Department officials are working to develop an infrastructure that will ensure that such cooperation is a cornerstone of emergency response.
The National Incident Management System (NIMS) being developed by DHS' Federal Emergency Management Agency will integrate response practices into a comprehensive framework for managing emergencies nationwide. NIMS could — and some officials believe it should — enable first responders at the federal, state and local levels to work together more effectively to manage domestic incidents regardless of their cause, size or complexity. Under a federal directive, NIMS will be in place nationwide by the end of fiscal 2007.
But actually getting NIMS operational is going to be far from simple, experts say. "It's one thing to take the awareness course and it's quite another to go out as a firefighter or an EMT and put it into play, and you need to do that," said Gil Jamieson, acting director of the NIMS Integration Center at DHS.
The idea that multiple jurisdictions and disciplines must come together during an incident is moving out of isolated successes into practice in every state and at all levels of government as officials are "embracing the idea of unified command," Jamieson said. "[But] now that we've got them there, we need to get them to really work together."
DHS officials will incorporate NIMS into all of the exercises they sponsor, he said, noting that the system was part of the TopOff 2 exercises in the Seattle and Chicago areas in 2003. Many government officials involved in those exercises have said NIMS provided an important first step toward coordination in such situations. NIMS also needs to be incorporated into training, exercises, acquisition practices, management policies and every aspect of first responders' daily lives — to become as much a part of their operations as rescuing a cat stranded in a tree. But neither NIMS nor first responders are quite ready for that, officials said.
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