FEMA CERT, NIMS, ICS, LOL, EMI, BBQ, HTTP acronyms

[TGS]

I was actually initially turned in the ICS (more specifically EOC, really) direction when I brought the whole CERT thing up in conversation. While CERT seems volunteer oriented on a "if you're around get your ass over here right now and help" level, based on my reading EOC seems more like a pseudo-career that's still evolving into something recognized as a standard field one can choose to work in.

You'll have to further school me, but isn't general incident command the responsibility of responding EMTs/LEOs/whoever has "educational seniority/qualifications"? Where would a volunteer or even professional EOC bro fit into that scheme? Are they first responders in the traditional sense (where EOC duties are tacked on to their normal job responsibilities) or is it a specialized profession where an incident runs long enough that a big 'ol command van shows up with staff aimed only at situation management? Is that something traditionally done on the side or is it pretty much a full time gig? (basically I want to do this sort of thing just when I can, I still gotta make my current salary at my current job for now to eat and pay the bills).

I'm pretty out of the loop with how emergency management actually goes down. CERT makes sense to me since it's just a semi-standardized organization that's used as the local government sees fit, but immediate incident/event management in my uneducated mind (likely incorrectly) boils down to "whoever has the most bars on their shoulder runs the show until someone with more bars shows up".

On a side note thanks for the replies everyone, seriously. Not only for me, but for anyone else looking to dip their toes into this sort of thing it really lays it all out in terms far easier to understand than reading arbitrary FEMA class descriptions.

On scene command us generally approached as a unified command....meaning Fire and LE working together, usually by hanging out at whichever person has the better positioned or more advanced/useful command vehicle. EMS is generally established as a branch of that command.

With the exception of gigantic disasters, the EOC skills are usually most employed by dispatchers, because dispatch (especially progressive county-centered services) are essentially an EOC. On-scene command is established, but again.....with the exception of gigantic disasters or pre-planned huge events (Fairs, sporting events, marathons, etc) it usually consists of a chief's truck and a pull out tent and whiteboard/scoreboard, if they even get that far. Calling such an EOC is not appropriate.


Note: My experience is colored by working as an EMS chief as my past job in the northeast where I worked a few MCIs. My current agency has ops/EOC centers with varying levels of staffing, and I've never worked in one outside of hands on training exercises. We don't really follow ICS/NIMS either due to a completely different mission.

ETA: Most professional EOC positions are usually called "watch standers", or possibly "desk officer". Most full-time professional EOC positions are located in the federal government, precious few in state governments and very large cities. #JDD might be able to help with delving deeper into EOC/ops centers that he has worked in/with.

[TGS]

I'm just going to start another post instead of continually editing that previous one......sorry, it's just that I'm all giddy when P-F.com members get involved in the safety/security of their community and nation. I get overly excited and start writing stream-of-consciousness.

As for positions that you might find accessible to yourself, consider that there are professional watch stander positions in the federal gov't as I wrote, but as you progressively get smaller in organizational size/reach, those positions will usually be filled ad-hoc as needed using police in particular, but also fire and EMS.

Another thing to consider besides CERT, if you don't find what you're looking for, is reaching out to your State's EMS Task Force, if they have one. The ones in New Jersey, Virginia, and Texas in particular are very robust and include mobile EOC/Comm trucks. Involvement in such is usually staffed with those sorts of technical experts or useful people (maybe a volunteer trained up in EOC operations, like yourself).

In addition to a State's EMS Task Force, also look into the State's Medical Reserve Corps, which you should definitely have one (it's a national model). My wife previously interned with the NJ Medical Reserve Corps, and in addition to the anticipated positions of nurses, doctors, etc, they had a dedicated contingent of non-healthcare technical folks to actually run the apparatus. I'd be surprised if ops center staffers weren't included in there.

Caveat Emptor: Like CERT, these organizations can vary widely in how active they are. Some are entirely paper tigers, whereas others actually get stuff done to varying levels.

[Notorious E.O.C.]

I was actually initially turned in the ICS (more specifically EOC, really) direction when I brought the whole CERT thing up in conversation. While CERT seems volunteer oriented on a "if you're around get your ass over here right now and help" level, based on my reading EOC seems more like a pseudo-career that's still evolving into something recognized as a standard field one can choose to work in.

You'll have to further school me, but isn't general incident command the responsibility of responding EMTs/LEOs/whoever has "educational seniority/qualifications"? Where would a volunteer or even professional EOC bro fit into that scheme? Are they first responders in the traditional sense (where EOC duties are tacked on to their normal job responsibilities) or is it a specialized profession where an incident runs long enough that a big 'ol command van shows up with staff aimed only at situation management? Is that something traditionally done on the side or is it pretty much a full time gig? (basically I want to do this sort of thing just when I can, I still gotta make my current salary at my current job for now to eat and pay the bills).

Aha. So, in theory, here's how it all works (the [not really] short version):

ICS

A major incident goes down. "Major," in this case, is relative, but usually involves multiple agencies and disciplines. Let's say Hicksadishu in West Podunkistan takes a hit from an EF-3 tornado. To start off, this is a fire/rescue/SAR, EMS, law enforcement, human services, and utilities problem. Depending on the jurisdiction, those agencies may or may not work closely together on a regular basis, but the scope and complexity of this disaster requires a greater-than-usual degree of coordination. In the field, this is what ICS is intended to do: provide a common vocabulary and organizational structure so all the players can operate jointly in an effective and efficient manner.

At the top of the ICS org chart is the Incident Commander (IC). Depending on the nature of the incident and the agencies responding, there may be one agency that's clearly the lead organization. In that case, the IC is the guy or gal from that agency who's best-qualified to run the response (not necessarily the top-ranking dude - for example, I have seen incidents where the department's operations chief deferred to the HAZMAT major because of the methyl-ethyl-death in the air). If the incident is a Gordian knot of rabid rats, you are likely to see a Unified Command (UC) model, in which multiple agencies have coequal ICs who jointly determine objectives, strategy, and tactics, then pass down domain-specific instructions to their respective minions. The physical location where all this takes place is the Incident Command Post (ICP, not to be confused with the source of all juggalos).

In our Hicksadishu example, the fire department is running structural collapse rescues; EMS is doing casualty collection, triage, stabilization, packaging, and transports; the sheriff's department and city PD are pulling scene security and traffic control and assisting with SAR; the Red Cross is deploying a field canteen and setting up a shelter in the high school gym for citizens whose houses are now knee-high; and Podunkistan Light and Power is working to get critical infrastructure lit up again. Under ICS, you'll see the fire chief, county ambulance director, sheriff, police shift commander, Red Cross disaster services rep, and PL&P field engineering guy all huddled around the back of someone's Suburban.

The EOC

Note that nowhere in this mess are the city mayor, county manager, or emergency management director. They are at the county EOC, along with senior representatives from all of the agencies in the field plus the Bugscuffle County Health Department, Hicksadishu Human and Family Services, Bugscuffle County Streets & Roads, the mayor's press secretary, the county agricultural extension office, and so forth. When the agencies in the field have problems or resource needs that they can't resolve on the ground, they call their reps in the EOC. The people in the EOC, in turn, are responsible for solving those problems and getting the guys in the field the support they need. They're also tasked with gathering information and chewing it into intelligence so both the local executives and the Unified Command personnel have effective decision support. As an added bonus, this usually keeps those executives out from under the feet of the IC/UC. Additionally, the EOC is the jurisdiction's point of contact for state and federal authorities, should the incident require their aid, and it's where the jurisdiction begins assembling its documentation for everything from insurance claims to recovery planning to federal disaster aid fund eligibility.

I'm pretty out of the loop with how emergency management actually goes down. CERT makes sense to me since it's just a semi-standardized organization that's used as the local government sees fit, but immediate incident/event management in my uneducated mind (likely incorrectly) boils down to "whoever has the most bars on their shoulder runs the show until someone with more bars shows up".

So that brings me to...

Emergency Management

I will start by saying that emergency management has an identity problem. Ask ten emergency managers to define their field and you'll get about thirteen answers. It's a fairly young discipline, having evolved out of Cold War civil defense and a gradual acknowledgement of a need for a permanent coordinating function (spurred at the federal level by the fail that was the Three Mile Island response). At the state and local levels, you'll see a variety of operating models and subordinations (as @Drang and I have batted about upthread). Our professional society, the International Association of Emergency Managers, has a pretty good one-page PDF articulation of our definition, vision, mission, and principles.

In most jurisdictions, the EM agency owns the local EOC and is responsible for training people to work in it and making sure all the tech is ready to rock at the drop of a funnel cloud. However, most places experience disasters fairly infrequently. Therefore, the response mission - running the EOC, coordinating moving parts, facilitating decision support, and managing resources - is about 1% of an emergency manager's job. For the other 99%, we do:

Mitigation - Stuff to reduce the impact disasters have on the community. This often (but not always) happens after someone dies and politicians decide they need to Do Something to keep it from happening again. Examples include buying up flood-prone properties, demolishing the structures on them, and converting them to greenspace; pushing for legislation requiring property owners in the wildland-urban interface to maintain firebreaks and defensive landscaping; and getting tornado shelters included in new construction.

Preparedness - Planning, training, and equipping the community to deal with disasters when they occur. On the government level, this can look like getting a federal grant for a new HAZMAT apparatus for the fire department; bringing in TEEX to run an evacuation class for your local pro sports venue; or getting fire, EMS, police, water quality, and BigChemCorp reps to sit down at the table and build a joint plan for how to handle a chemical spill from the local methyl-ethyl-death plant. At the citizen level, this can include CERT programs, as you've seen; establishing a special needs registry for people to indicate ahead of time that they may need medical or evacuation assistance in a disaster; or going into immigrant communities alongside social services and interpreters to educate them on local hazards and basic household disaster preparedness.

Recovery - Getting the community back to normal after a disaster, which often involves redefining normal. If things got bad enough, recovery can be a multi-year project where you've gotta manage federal funds correctly or lose them (or even worse, have to repay them if you don't do what you said you were going to do). Recovery isn't always limited to physical infrastructure; think psychological issues, coordination of memorials, and restoring public trust in the government. We rarely are the lead agency for doing much recovery work beyond managing the funds and advising on how they can be spent, but the connections we build in mitigation and preparedness work often put us in a position to coordinate the discussions.

I am again running at the keyboard, so I'll cut it off there and await further inquiries. It's a nice change to have a thread here where I'm not licking the window and staring in at the cool kids...

[Drang]

If @Condition Write and @TGS keep dropping fact bombs, I may try and twist my manager's arm to read this thread...

As we've alluded to, a lot of this stuff is local. That includes things like use of volunteers in EOCs; the WA State EOC does use volunteers, if you can get to Camp Murky Murray.
The City if Kent, WA, where I took CERT, does not actively manage or direct CERT, just encourages them to organize at the neighborhood level; the rationale is that, in a disaster, the city won't have time or the resources to direct neighborhood efforts. Maybe that's a cold-blooded view. Hopefully, we won;t have to find out...
Here in the 98-double-ought-three, the city teaches CERT and offers advanced training to "Community Advance Teams".

Here's an interesting read on the background of how Civil Defense turned into FEMA/NIMS: Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die. The author's agenda is pretty clear from the subtitle, but that doesn't diminish the interest.

[RoyGBiv]

In TX, we also have a State Guard. Administered at the same level as the TX Army and Air National Guards, but with a "support militia" mission.
https://tmd.texas.gov/state-guard

The mission of the Texas State Guard (TXSG) is to provide mission-ready military forces to assist state and local authorities in times of state emergencies; to conduct homeland security and community service activities under the umbrella of Defense Support to Civil Authorities; and to augment the Texas Army National Guard and Texas Air National Guard as required.


TXSG Enlistment Information:

Resident of Texas for at least 180 days
Age 18 to 70
Reasonable Good Health
Pass criminal background check
Valid Texas Drivers License
Prior Military Service NOT required
If Prior Service - Honorable discharge required
Federal Service retirement NOT affected
NO overseas deployment

Bonus cool, free license plate.

[Drang]

Washington also has a state guard: https://mil.wa.gov/wsg-home

[Peally]

I went through the ICS-300 class last weekend (400 this weekend) as a background primer and I gotta say it was pretty fun. The content is written in 100% federal snoozefest style but our instructor was a good guy and doing stuff like our weekend local train crash scenario with the model he had and everything was really enjoyable. I mean the content is naturally grim, but making a mountain of strategic decisions and deciding which risks were acceptable all under a time limit was pretty fun. I was shit at it (my plan pretty much had a few fire trucks blown up among various unavoidable deaths/injuries) and I had to learn some basic things like MABAS resource charts on the fly, but it was fun and engaging. I'd say about 50% of the class was voluntold to be there through work though so experiences may have varied

Talking to him it sounds like locally we have an area Incident Management Team, EOCs, and a county over from my house (~20 minutes) a very highly regarded CERT group. Also sounds like there is a pretty good incident response framework in the state as well (example: our current state administration is on extremely good terms with the Nat Guard for getting a hold of resources). Once I have a baseline it sounds like it shouldn't be hard to find somewhere where I can be useful (because let's be honest, working the job I do the chances of me being an IC are almost zero).

Just wanted to thank everyone in here again, while it was all confusing as hell before I'm starting to mentally piece the parts together. As far as side gigs go for volunteer work this field should be pretty cool.

[peterb]

As a small-town volunteer firefighter, we had the basic ICS and NIMS classes, but most of the time my actual use was:
1) Report to Staging and check in
2) Receive an assignment
3) Do it

Seriously though, understanding the nomenclature and division of responsibilities is very helpful. Every fire call in the region was mutual aid with several departments responding, and having a common language and command structure no matter which town you were in was a huge help.

The EMS side was a bit different. We didn’t always respond with an officer, so there was a reasonable chance that I or someone on my crew would be Incident Command until reinforcements arrived. We did train on starting to build the command structure as a first responder.

[Drang]

I just finished an interesting book, American Dunkirk, about the maritime evacuation of survivors from Manhattan on 9/11.
American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11: James M Kendra, Tricia Wachtendorf: 9781439908211: AmazonSmile: Books
It's a whole 180 pages, including end matter, but the paperback is $23, and the Kindle edition is $22, because it's an academic publication. I got it through an Inter Library Loan.
Basically, anyone with a boat larger than a bass boat sailed towards Manhattan to help out; the Coast Guard limited their involvement with this boatlift to trying to coordinate efforts.

The reason I bring it up is that the book ends up with a discussion of the Incident Command System, and the types of incidents where it tends not to work so well, even while stating that there really isn't a viable substitute. One observation is that, even in incidents where the ICS doesn't fit well, it can be made to work IF all the jurisdictions and agencies involved have already worked out their relationships.

The authors tend to use a lot of mushy sociological terminology to describe people's responses and how they work together, which I suspect may be a large part of the reason that fire fighters and police officers and the like don't take the "Emergent Human Resources Model" of emergency response very seriously...

I also picked up a new catch phrase to use when the brass start complaining about the plan(s) I'm updating: "A plan is a tool, not a script."

[Peally]

I ended up joining and attending Team Rubicon training this past weekend here in Milwaukee; one of my original ICS classmates was a PIO for them and I checked the outfit out on a whim. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have found a more kickass organization to put that knowledge to use in. I'm just getting my feet wet at the moment and eating up any training and operation opportunities I can but there's 70 different directions to help out with them and they're all interesting from recon to debris clearing to general staff.

I ended up meeting and chatting with some incredible individuals the night of training and the organization's health and morale is clearly through the roof; it was almost jarring being in an environment where everyone was that engaged and ready to kick disasters and jobs in the asshole. If anyone is looking for volunteer disaster work CONUS or abroad I can't think of a better place to jump in.