Incident Command System - History

History

The ICS concept was originally developed in 1968 at a Phoenix AZ meeting of Fire Chiefs. Originally the program was established to follow the management structure of the US Navy and it was mainly for fire fighting of wildfires in California and Arizona. During the 1970s, ICS was fully developed during massive wildfire suppression efforts in California and following a series of catastrophic wildfires in California's urban interface. Property damage ran into the millions, and many people died or were injured. Studies determined that response problems often related to communication and management deficiencies rather than lack of resources or failure of tactics. ICS fell under California's Standardized Emergency Management System or SEMS. ICS became a national model for command structures at a fire, crime scene or major incident. The ICS System was used in New York at the first terrorist attempt on the twin towers in the 1990s. In 2003, SEMS went national with the passage of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5 (HSPD5) mandating all federal, state, and local agencies use NIMS or the National Incident Management System to manage emergencies in order to receive federal funding. The Superfund Amendment and Re-authorization Act title III mandated that all first responders to a hazardous waste or hazmat emergency would be trained in accordance with 29 CFR 1910.120(q). This standard recognizes the OSHA ICS program. The National Incident Management System (NIMS) came about as a direct result of the terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001.

Weaknesses in incident management were often due to:

• Lack of accountability, including unclear chains of command and supervision.
• Poor communication due to both inefficient uses of available communications systems and conflicting codes and terminology.
• Lack of an orderly, systematic planning process.
• No predefined methods to integrate inter-agency requirements into the management structure and planning process effectively.
• Freelancing by individuals with specialized skills during an incident without coordination with other first responders
• Lack of knowledge with common terminology during an incident.

Emergency managers determined that the existing management structures — frequently unique to each agency — did not scale to dealing with massive mutual aid responses involving dozens of distinct agencies and when these various agencies worked together their specific training and procedures clashed. As a result, a new command and control paradigm was collaboratively developed to provide a consistent, integrated framework for the management of all incidents from small incidents to large, multi-agency emergencies.