By Bobby Halton |
During a recent conference, a discussion focused on the issue of regionalization. The instigator of the conversation was vexed as to how to engage the local organizations and memberships in a journey toward regionalization. His question was how to get everyone interested and involved in standardizing policies and procedures to improve interagency operations. He felt the troops were resistant to change, a change he felt was critical.
Some in the discussion asked, Why are you pushing regionalization? How will it look if you’re successful? Others suggested starting points: Focus on communications, take baby steps, let the inmates run the asylum. The conversation was lively and fascinating; it reminded us of why we all love attending shows and conferences-for the networking.
After the discussion, several mentioned their observation that they had been involved in this discussion many times before. No one was complaining about it; they were simply aware of the repetition of themes that seemed to be the focus of our firefighting discussions. They were right, and that is a good thing. Someone mentioned that change in our beloved institution was slow and we should expect the regionalization to take around 10 years; I agree. The fire service is a wise and deliberate entity, and that is a good thing.
Someone once said, “There never seems to be enough time to do something right, but there is always enough time to do something over.” Our fire service has seen its share of “solutions,” “silver bullets,” and “answers.” Some are still around, just rediscovered, and some have been debunked, defamed, and discarded. The ones that lasted went through the wringer whether they included ideas as evident as motorized apparatus, SCBAs, or “firefighting suits” or as obscure as routine physicals, main markings, and Bresnan distributors. The defining characteristic was the persistent use and rediscovery of the need, applicability, and functionality of these tools and concepts.
Case in point for rediscovery for the fire service was local incident management as defined by Chief Alan Brunacini’s Fire Ground Command. Many remember a brilliant paper written for The Journal of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security by Cynthia Renaud who, when it was published, was police chief in Folsom, California. The paper was called “The Missing Piece of NIMS: Teaching Incident Commanders How to Function in the Edge of Chaos.” It is a brilliant work and has many outstanding points.
Chief Renaud provides in her abstract a great overview of the issue: “The National Incident Management System (NIMS) has become a subject of controversy, as many practitioners find severe limitations with the system’s field effectiveness. To label NIMS a complete failure and look for a different response tool would be rash and premature. A deeper exploration of NIMS shows that it is very useful in structuring response efforts for large-scale incidents, but only in later operational periods, when a certain amount of order has been restored.”
“The NIMS failure point, however, is that it offers limited help to those first-arriving responders who must deal with the initial chaos inherent at the outset of every scene. This article explores the dynamics of the initial edge-of-chaos that characterizes the first phase of every large-scale incident and offers recommendations for additions to NIMS that will better prepare first responding incident commanders to work their way through that chaos and later apply the NIMS process with purpose.”
The police chief’s point was well taken, as it was 30 years earlier when Chief Brunacini pointed out the same shortcoming. The good police chief probably never heard of Fire Ground Command, and what was so remarkable about her insight was that it further reaffirms the rediscovery of local IMS.
The discovery of the shortcoming was not what stands out; it was what she stated in her conclusion, “While it seems counterintuitive to the need to take immediate and decisive action, a good incident commander will take a moment to go through some simple, cognitive sense-making steps on arrival. He/she will think, what has happened here? What am I trying to accomplish? What do I recognize in this event? What have I never seen or heard about before? What do I know? What do I need to know? What can I begin to do? In doing this, the incident commander’s challenge is to ‘catch up’ to the event, not attempt to stop the quickly spinning carousel of chaos so he/she can step on to participate in the ride.”
Chief Renaud also concluded, “The NIMS and ICS are an invaluable tool for a structured event response and provide an organization that best handles the complicated nature of a coordinated response effort. But in the initial, chaotic phase inherent in every large-scale event, the organizational structure of ICS is not yet useful. First responders with the inherent skill set to ‘function in an environment fraught with uncertainty, friction, and risk’ will have ‘the most profound impact on the successful resolution of a conflict.’ These first responders must be educated through participation in reality-based scenario training that will help them practice sense-making techniques, add to their library of mental slides, and foster relationships with each other across disciplines and jurisdictions so that, if the unthinkable does occur yet again, those men and women will be as ready as possible to insert themselves into chaos and wrestle it back to normalcy.”
Some ideas were accepted because of the messenger, some because they fit so perfectly to our needs, and some we just flat-out made work in spite of themselves. In the case of the messenger, the old saying still holds true in the fire service, “An expert is anybody 20 miles from home with a briefcase.”
Fire Engineering Archives