Session 18 1

National Incident Management Systems

Session 18 Slide Deck

Session 18 2

Session Objective

1. Explain the Policy and Practical Implications of NIMS Implementation for Stakeholders at All Jurisdictional Levels

Session 18 3

NIMS Adoption

• Adoption might be both logical and generally beneficial• Adoption can be an action that carries no actual or

perceived value • Each stakeholder is unique with regards to:

– Authority and autonomy– Relationship to other stakeholders– Reliance upon federal funding– Other factors

• For each stakeholder, there are positive and negative consequences associated with adoption

Session 18 4

NIMS Implications• Stakeholder to Stakeholder Relationships• NIMS, Jurisdiction Type, and Concerns About

Autonomy• Impacts on Organizational and Operational

Flexibility• Effects on Established Professional Relationships• The Fine Line Between Compliance and

Competence• The Effect on the Efficacy of Mutual Aid• Impacts on Safety and Liability• Financial Implications

Session 18 5

Stakeholder to Stakeholder Relationships

• Adoption affects relationships that exist between different emergency management stakeholders.

• NIMS is flexible / scalable, but its structure affects how stakeholders interact with each other.

• Does NIMS bridge the gap between agencies that have drastically different cultures?

• Positive effect on the relationships between stakeholders that might not typically interact

• But NIMS formalizes a relationship that might otherwise function better in an informal setting

Session 18 6

NIMS, Jurisdiction Type, and Concerns About Autonomy

• There are differing / conflicting perceptions between agencies and stakeholders in small and large communities about the value of NIMS

• Is NIMS appropriate for both urban and rural settings?• Has NIMS been handed down to the local level? • Rural America – a culture that is resistant to outside

influence• Rural America is less formal organizationally • In rural areas relationships are easily formed because

everyone knows each other

Session 18 7

Impacts on Organizational and Operational Flexibility

• Does the NIMS structure limit organizational and operational flexibility?

• NIMS prevents ‘freelancing’

• There is a certain sense of uncertainty with disasters that often requires an ability to change course ‘on the fly’

Session 18 8

Effects on Established Professional Relationships

• NIMS is effective in situations where stakeholders have very little or no experience working together

• When stakeholder organizations are familiar with each other, and have worked together, NIMS will cause a loss of familiarity and assumed roles and responsibilities

• NIMS replaces the personal and professional relationships that have already been established through planning, meetings, drills, exercises, mutual aid efforts, and past disaster experience

• Do ESFs only pretend to use NIMS in actual practice?

Session 18 9

The Fine Line Between Compliance and Competence

• It remains to be seen whether stakeholders are actually using NIMS in operations

• “Practitioners have either refused to change the way they've done business for years, or they've continued the same old practices with a different vocabulary. “

• NIMS competence must be led from the top• “NIMS compliance is a total-entity effort, and

therefore needs to be coordinated by the highest authority with total-entity powers, usually the chancellor or president.”

Session 18 10

NIMS Impact on the Efficacy of Mutual Aid

• NIMS facilitates cross-agency mutual aid• Federal Government not involved in 99.9% of

incidents, as they are managed locally• Some feel the Federal Government created NIMS

to make things better in all incidents using Fed involvement as the standard of practice

• Because of NIMS, all mutual aid becomes subject to the policies and protocols laid out in NIMS

• Some feel that all that was actually needed was a coordination system, like the Multi-Agency Coordination group (MAC).

Session 18 11

Impact on Safety and Liability • Two of the greatest positive impacts of NIMS are:

– An increase in incident operational safety– An associated decrease in the likelihood of negative liability

implications resulting from on-scene accidents

• NIMS compliance and competence increases the likelihood that:– Commands are understood– There is an operational awareness of all actions and the

individuals tasked with performing them, and that all incident needs are accounted for

• Fire chiefs who don’t follow the NIMS leave themselves open to liability or, worse, criminal malfeasance

Session 18 12

Financial Implications• Positive and negative financial implications

for emergency management stakeholders:– Grant eligibility – Reduced emergency preparedness and response

costs

• Grant eligibility is probably the most obvious financial implication

• “It’s quite simple: in order to receive federal funding for preparedness, your organization must adopt ICS and NIMS both formally and in practice.”

• NIMS can reduce costs by increasing operational efficiencies