Talk:Incident Command System

Condolidation of ICS into NIMS Page
Posted in National Incident Management System talkpage: Consideration to consolidate the Incident Command System (ICS) page into this one since ICS is in actuality replaced by the NIMS. What do you think? Paradiver (talk) 22:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC) Paradiver (talk) 22:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

NIMS mandates the use of the ICS, it is not a replacement for it. NIMS and the ICS are very different things.--Bg10117 (talk) 17:21, 10 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Agreed. NIMS mandates the use of ICS and describes how it is to be implemented. If they were the same thing, they wouldn't have different names. I certainly won't dispute that the core of NIMS is the ICS. --Shaggorama (talk) 18:43, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Overhaul
VigilancePrime 21:22, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
 * First, archived the talk page.
 * Second, made notes on current talk page.
 * Third, completely overhauled the Incident Command System page. It still needs some work, but is far better. Removed some factual inaccuracies, some POV, and reorganized. Ultimately, I used a lot of the original text and did major copyedit.
 * References are total rather than inline. The article is from the reseources under the "References" heading. This is different from the usual article. Admittedly, I did a good deal from memory.

There's a giant Note just before the history section referencing the same, that appears to be original research.

Suggest it be interested into the history section or removed. I'm not comfortable making changes. JustinRJoneZ (talk) 02:37, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Role playing
This piece of text seems to have been deleted from the article:


 * The Incident Command System (ICS) is a management system used to organize emergency response. ICS offers a scalable response to an emergency (incident) of any magnitude, and provides a common framework within which people can work together. These people (resources) may be drawn from multiple agencies that do not routinely work together. The system is designed to grow and shrink along with the incident, allowing more resources to be smoothly added into the system when needed and released when no longer needed. This is achieved because, in essence, ICS is a special case of role-playing. Authorities and responsibilities are inherent in roles (positions); individuals are assigned more or less temporarily to those roles, and can be reassigned, replaced, or released as needed. This key aspect of ICS helps to reduce or eliminate the "who's in charge" problem.

This text does not quite say what I think is intended, but something like it needs to be put back in the article. The key point is that during an incident people are assigned to roles temporarily, more or less regardless of their normal roles. At least, in some user communities it works this way, and it is very flexible and effective. In other user communities, the roles may be quite fixed from one incident to the next. This too can be effective, but it is not flexible. --Una Smith 03:48, 20 October 2007 (UTC)


 * While I understand, I think, what you're getting at, I think that referring to ICS in any way as role-playing is a terrible way to put it. The layperson won't understand what is meant and associate it to something like Dungeons & Dragons (I know that may sound ridiculous, but you'd be surprised!) or the silly training that nobody takes seriously in a retail sales environment.
 * The way I see it, the article does get into the points about how positions in ICS are assigned (or should be) to the most qualified regardless of day-to-day "rank", although in reality this is not always the case (my favorite FEMA ICS video has a police sergeant roll up and say "based on what you've told me, I'm taking over as incident commander" and then puts his little green bubble-light on his toasty-warm car. It's awful)!
 * This article does need a lot more work and nobody seems to have visibility on it at all. Since overhauling it a while back, there have been virtually no significant edits to it. Even as I read through it I see a lot more work is needed. I would appreciate any help so long as we keep to the NIMS-compliant ICS series training. The theory is more important in an article like this, I believe. I'd like to know yours (and others') thoughts on the matter.
 * VigilancePrime 04:57, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, it might help to strike "Personnel" and use instead "Jobs" or "Roles" (without reference to role-playing). Jobs are filled from a pool of available persons who are qualified to fill that job. Note that above you wrote "positions in ICS are assigned (or should be) to the most qualified". Do you see the problem? It is backward. ICS assigns persons to positions, not positions to persons. Positions to persons encourages the idea that the person then somehow owns the position. Also, re NIMS-compliant, please remember that this is not "USA Wikipedia". The article needs clear writing, explaining ICS accurately yet from a lay-person's perspective; if the goal is to copy NIMS ICS, let's just point to the source. By the way, I really dislike the current reference style; I want to know which of N references contains the relevant information. --Una Smith 04:59, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Best of all, a layperson should be able to understand NIMS-compliant discussion because it is NIMS-compliant, i.e. clear text. Isn't that awesome! Anyway, how about "positions in ICS are filled (or should be) by the most qualified ... person when the Incident Commander deems necessary to activate a position or organizational segment..." or similar. Does that make any sense? Overall, the entire article needs far more overhaul than I was able to initially complete. (As for referencing, it's all throughout the four ICS modules as well as on FEMA's Emergency Management Institute's website and courses, available for anyone to take, read, learn, and become certified, also in hard-copy materials and courses.) VigilancePrime 05:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

"positions in ICS are filled (or should be) by the most qualified" sounds like the result of a dog fight among the persons who consider themselves qualified. People are assigned to positions as needed by positions higher in the organizational structure. I think this article would be of most use to the world if it did less rehashing of NIMS ICS and more comparing and contrasting its use in different communities (geographic, functional). --Una Smith 05:40, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Wildland Firefighting Box
What's the deal with the wildland firefighting box? The ICS is much more globally applicable than this, bigger than the fire service even. I'm all for increasing the visibility of this article, but I feel like there must be a more appropriate box we can attach to it. I feel that this box makes the article's scope appear narrower than it is. --Shaggorama (talk) 18:52, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
 * No one has argued this point, so I have taken the initiative and removed the box. Any smoke jumpers who disagree please speak up on my talk page as well as this forum. --Shaggorama (talk) 21:17, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Wildland firefighting originated ICS, because of the interagency nature of the effort. Jclemens (talk) 04:10, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved per discussion. - GTBacchus(talk) 04:09, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Incident command system → Incident Command System – This is a proper noun as defined in the FEMA documentation most commonly know by its accronym, ICS. There was an undiscussed move a year ago that changed this. Corresponding articles include: National Incident Management System, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Multiagency Coordination Systems among other associated articles. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:10, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Support per nom. This is a proper noun. Dohn joe (talk) 21:14, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Support Exit2DOS • Ctrl • Alt • Del 21:10, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

So Katrina was a solved problem, right? Right?
If this blueprint for incident response is so super-fantastic, it would be good to explain why it did not work well for the Katrina Hurricane in New Orleans. How has the system changed as a result of the failure to manage that incident? That's a big question on my mind after reading this article (and taking a course that trained me in incident management). SystemBuilder (talk) 23:51, 29 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Based on conversations I've had with emergency managers involved in the Katrina incident, I don't believe ICS was the failure. The failure was higher up than the CoC of ICS. However, there were many changes within NIMS in the years after the hurricane in 2005, the majority of which can be found on the FEMA website under NIMS Alerts (PDF documents that are essentially notifications of change/emphasis of policy). That said, it would be interesting to see an "Example Applications" section or something similar with various examples of real-world application of ICS. Katrina, Ike, Aurora Theater Shooting, and a few SAR incidents come to mind as big, known, and obvious examples. --KCGrimes (talk) 16:20, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Article Evaluation
I am a student at Texas State University in the Public Administration undergraduate program and am completing this article evaluation as an assignment for classes POSI 3318 and POSI 3316 for the Fall 2015 semester. I will be following up the below critiques and suggestions with my own edits next week.

To start, I am an aspiring emergency manager with field experience as an EMT in EMS and the ED. My primary ICS experience comes from my various ground, special operations, and management roles in Wilderness Search & Rescue as part of a volunteer team.

Although this article is decent in length, it has very few citations where there are certainly some due. For instance, in the History section there are textual references to OSHA and the relationship of NIMS to the 9/11 attacks but no cited sources for these assertions. They are widely known among the EM community, but even basics need citations. There are many other examples throughout the article that should also be addressed to legitimize the great content. That said, the quality of the content is very good and makes this article an excellent resource for a quick overview of ICS (as it is intended).

There are a few nouns that are left in lower case, such as Incident Action Plan and all of the ICS positions (Incident Commander, Safety Officer, etc.)

Some things I suggest adding (and will probably add next week) are:

-Quick overview and listing of the various ICS forms, mentioning the concept of their use and modification

-Addition of the various common Section deputy positions (Documentation Unit Leader, Facilities Unit Leader, etc.)

-Reformat Basis section to allow for elaboration of the implimentation of ICS in each specific setting (Wilderness SAR, USAR, Wildland Fire, etc., all implement it a little different (Search Manager, Fire Officer, etc.)

I don't mean to knit pick the work the community has done, I only intend to point out room for improvement. As stated, I plan on spending time next week to make the edits discussed above and add to the article as well.--KCGrimes (talk) 16:49, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Incident Command System. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070714010117/http://www.training.fema.gov/emiweb/downloads/IS200%20Lesson%20Summary.pdf to http://training.fema.gov/emiweb/downloads/IS200%20Lesson%20Summary.pdf

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Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 05:14, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Incident Command System. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20080423021922/http://orgmail2.coe-dmha.org:80/dr/DisasterResponse.nsf/section/07?opendocument&home=html to http://orgmail2.coe-dmha.org/dr/DisasterResponse.nsf/section/07?opendocument&home=html

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Inaccurate history? moved from in-article
NOTE: Parts of the information in this "history" of the Incident Command System are largely inaccurate, being at odds with the actual development sequence, the concept, design, and development having been carried out during 1972-76 by the FIRESCOPE RD&A Program at the U.S. Forest Service Forest Fire Research Laboratory in Riverside California, as a cooperative effort with the federal, State, and county fire services in Southern California. There may have been a meeting of Fire Chiefs in 1968 for something, but a multiagency ICS was not even a concept until presented to agency heads as a proposed part of FIRESCOPE and--after much discussion about differences between organization, equipment, practices, and terminology between urban and wildland fire protection services--approved, and an interagency task force to work with Research established in 1972. (ICS was never referred to as "Field Command Operations System") By the latter 1970s, ICS had been adopted by federal federal wildland fire services nationally, and in the early 80s had gotten the attention of the National Fire Administration for inclusion in their training. Adoption by FEMA followed. (R.A. Chase --former Asst. Program Manager, FIRESCOPE RD&A Program) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rachase (talk • contribs)
 * Moved the note above out of the article body to the talk page to allow for discussion on how to improve the accuracy of the article. Ping . Schazjmd   (talk)  19:54, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Emergent Human Resources Management
Perhaps discussion should be included of this variant model. Or perhaps, a separate article, with cross-links. I found no Wikipedia article other than the (overly general) Emergency management: which, though it covers most of the subject, does not mention either ICS or EHRM. Here are some sources for possible consultation: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267005555_Emergent_Human_Resource_Management_The_Evolving_'Ten-Commandments' https://www.academia.edu/18836004/Emergent_Human_Resource_Management_The_Evolving_Ten-Commandments_ https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1016/S0742-6186(06)15002-7/full/html?skipTracking=true Mention and criticism of ICS and EHRM are in chapter 5 "Blending Art and Science, or Mindful Muddling" of this book: Kendra, James M; Wachtendorf, Tricia (2016). American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11. Temple University:2603:6010:4E42:500:61C8:FC0E:67AA:A6B1 (talk) 16:21, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Those sources all seem more applicable to Human resource management than to this article or Emergency management. Schazjmd   (talk)  16:28, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Incidents
The explanation of incidents in this article is the most detailed on Wikipedia from what I can find. Perhaps it should be moved to Incident management, or its own article? Tule-hog (talk) 09:52, 20 July 2024 (UTC)