National Incident Management System



National Incident Management System

Introduction

The incident of attacks on World trade centre and Pentagon called for a more enhanced system for the prevention, readiness, response, recuperation and extenuation capableness and coordination processes all over the country. That's why, on 28th of February, 2003, Homeland Security Presidential Directive was issued by then President that directs the Secretary of Homeland for the development and administration of a National Incident Management System. The NIMS is not a resource allocation plan or an operational incident management, instead it demonstrates a complete set of concepts, principle, terms, policies and organizational procedures to render valuable and efficient management of incident with collaboration at all levels.

NIMS offers a reliable and unswerving template to Governmental, nongovernmental and private-sector all over the country to work in partnership in an effective and efficient manner to get prepared, foreclose, respond to, and recuperate from domestic incidents, apart from size, cause, or complexity, including acts of disastrous intimidation.

The NIMS structures available best practices into a coherent and steady, approach to inland incident management across the nation. NIMS is integrated in such a way to be applicable at all jurisdictional levels and throughout functional disciplines in an all-emergencies circumstances. The main elements that constitute this systems approach include command and management, readiness, Management of Resources, Communications and Information, Supporting Technologies, and continuing Management and Maintenance. (National Incident Management System, 2004)

Discussion

Overview of Command Structure Prescribed by the NIMS

The ICS describes the operating features, interactive management factors, and composition of incident management and emergency response organizations kept during the entire process of an incident.

For effective and efficient domestic incident management, Incident Command System has been designed by integration of combination of facilities, personnel, equipment, communications, procedures and operating within a general organizational structure. The vitality of ICS is that it is extensively applicable across disciplines. ICS is used for the organization of both upcoming and longstanding field-level operations for a wide range of natural and manmade disasters, from small to complex emergencies. Implementing ICS was the first step of many jurisdictions towards NIMS compliance. ICS is generally integrated for the facilitation of activities in five main functional domains of command, administration, operations, logistics, and planning and finance.

ICS has been in use for over 30 year and it is not a new concept in United States, however, the traditional ICS is not adequate enough to cope with the acts of chemical, biological, ...