ITAC Part-One - IMS Alliance

FIRE SERVICE LEADERSHIP >>>
By MARK EMERY
Integrated Tactical
Accountability
“Engine 54, Where Are You?”
Part 1 – Introducing a Freelance-Prevention System That Works
Integrated Tactical Accountability
will tell the incident commander
who is on the scene, where they
are and what they are doing – not
just some of the people some of
the time, but all of the people all
of the time.
Bill Bennett
MARK EMERY, EFO, is a shift battalion chief with the Woodinville, WA, Fire & Life Safety District. He is a graduate of the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer program and an NFA
instructor specialist. Emery received a bachelor of arts degree from California State University at Long Beach and is a partner with Fire Command Seattle LLC in King County, WA. He may be contacted
at fci@usa.com or access his website www.competentcommand.com.
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FIRE SERVICE LEADERSHIP
Let’s get right to the point: If your implementation of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) Incident
Command System (ICS) does not help you achieve and maintain tactical accountability, your implementation
“system” is flawed and incomplete.
You may remember the TV sitcom
“Car 54, Where Are You?” which aired
from 1961 to 1963 and later in reruns.
The story line centered on the comical
exploits of NYPD officers Gunther Toody
and Francis Muldoon and their assigned
cruiser, Car 54. Nobody in the fictitious
53rd Precinct ever seemed to know where
Toody and Muldoon were or what they
were doing. The lack of Car 54 accountability
made for some good laughs.
The contemporary fire service has
had a variety of personnel accountability
systems in place for many years. Each of
these systems can tell you who is at an incident;
few accountability systems can tell
you where each firefighter is at any given
moment. Integrated Tactical Accountability
will tell you who is there, where they
are and what they are doing – not just
some of the people some of the time, but
all of the people all of the time. Integrated
Tactical Accountability implementation
means that freelancing can be prevented
and thus should no longer be tolerated.
Nobody will have to ask, “Engine 54,
where are you?”
Putting It to Work
Tactical accountability can be
achieved without batteries, without software
and without expensive gee-whiz
gadgets, and it will work at 3 o’clock in
the morning. Achieving and maintaining
tactical accountability is quick and easy
and dovetails perfectly with the tenets of
NIMS ICS and NFPA 1561. In fact, the
Integrated Tactical Accountability system
is the only implementation system in
North America that offers how to meet
or exceed all of the performance requirements
identified by NFPA 1561, Standard
on Emergency Services Incident Management
System (2008 edition).
To declare that your fire department
has adopted and uses NIMS to manage an
incident is not entirely true. NIMS may
provide a familiar ICS framework for
managing an incident (what’s old is new
again), but NIMS fails to provide implementation
guidance. Example: While it’s
nice to know that a division is defined as
geographic and a group is defined as functional,
exactly how are you supposed to
“supervise” a division or group during a
multi-alarm fire? Shouldn’t a division be
doing something functional within its
geographic area of responsibility? Likewise,
shouldn’t a group be executing its
function someplace geographic? If they
are both functional and geographic,
what’s the true difference? (We will explore
this question in a future article.)
How, and in what form, do group
supervisors receive and supervise their
pieces of the overall incident action plan?
How do division supervisors achieve and
maintain tactical accountability? When
the incident commander or a branch director
asks for a status report, what do
the division or group supervisors report?
These questions probe well beyond basic
geographic and functional distinctions.
NIMS won’t help implement the ICS
any more than the NFPA 1901 committee
will submit a bid to build your next fire
engine. NIMS was designed for what attorney
and risk-management guru Gordon
Graham refers to as “discretionary
time” incidents. Discretionary means you
have time to schedule a planning meeting
for the next operational period. You don’t
The Challenge
The purpose of this three-part series is to help you eliminate freelancing by achieving and maintaining tactical accountability.
PART ONE WILL:
1. Establish why tactical accountability is important.
2. Identify National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standards that “require” that you achieve and maintain
tactical accountability.
3. Introduce important distinctions between personnel accountability and tactical accountability.
4. Identify who is responsible for personnel accountability.
5. Identify who is responsible for tactical accountability.
PART TWO WILL:
1. Describe how to quickly achieve tactical accountability (using familiar strategic tools).
2. Describe how to maintain tactical accountability throughout the course of an incident.
3. Illustrate how to establish a “thread” that strategically connects the command post with a firefighter operating a
nozzle within the hazard area.
PART THREE WILL:
1. Introduce the three levels of fireground freelancing.
2. Describe how to eliminate geographic freelancing.
3. Describe how to eliminate functional freelancing.
4. Clarify the real difference between a division and a group.
5. Introduce strategic tools for controlling the ebb and flow of incident resources.
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have the luxury of discretionary time
when you are the first on-scene fire officer
at a 3-o’clock-in-the-morning, multifamily
building fire. The operational period
is in your face.
Nobody is going to fill out ICS 201
and 203 forms in the front yard at a house
fire, schedule a meeting and circulate
copies of the plan to arriving companies.
(Doing so would be trying to hammer
a discretionary square peg into a nondiscretionary
round hole.) ICS planning
forms are designed for long-term incidents
that offer discretionary time. Integrated
Tactical Accountability provides
a structured and systematic process for
the implementation of NIMS ICS and
NFPA 1561 during in-your-face, nondiscretionary
time incidents – the kind of
incidents that you respond to every day.
Standards and Mandates
Standards and mandates (NIMS is
a federal mandate) provide guidance on
what we should do, but they do not hint
at how we should comply. Compliance
and implementation is up to the “authority
having jurisdiction” (AHJ). To address
the spirit and intent of a particular standard
or mandate is up to your organization
or region. Consider the following
citations from the 2008 edition of NFPA
1561, Standard on Emergency Services
Incident Management System:
4.5.2 The system shall maintain accountability
for the location and status
condition of each organizational element
at the scene of the incident.
5.3.10 The incident commander shall
maintain an awareness of the location and
function of all companies or units at the
scene of the incident.
5.8.9.1 All supervisory personnel shall
maintain a constant awareness of the position
and function of all responders assigned
to operate under their supervision.
5.8.9.2 This awareness shall serve as
the basic means of accountability that
shall be required for operational safety.
Note the words I emphasized: location…condition…function…position…basic.
What these NFPA citations require as a
“basic means of accountability” is that the
incident commander and division/group
supervisors shall maintain an awareness
of the location/position and function of all
companies, units and responders (personnel).
Also notice that this basic means of
accountability shall be required for operational
safety. NFPA 1561 ventures well beyond
mere personnel tracking. However,
as mentioned previously, NFPA does not
provide a hint at how to make sure this
happens. The term I coined for maintaining
this location and function awareness
is “tactical accountability.” The structured
and systematic process which assures
seamless compliance is called Integrated
Tactical Accountability.
“Accountability” Defined
There is a significant difference between
personnel accountability and tactical
accountability. In general, “accountability”
is defined as a process for tracking
personnel during an incident. According
to NFPA 1561, personnel accountability
is a system that “readily identifies both
the location and function of all members
operating at an incident scene.” (There
are those pesky words again: location and
function.) “Location” means more than
knowing that there are eight companies
on the fireground and that there are a
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bunch of firefighters somewhere in the
building; location means you know from
what side each team entered the building
and on what floor each team is working.
Tactical accountability means that you
also know what each team is doing and
why. Again, if freelancing is tolerated, it is
impossible to achieve and maintain tactical
accountability.
To ensure that the tenets of NFPA 1561
– and NIMS ICS – are addressed, two levels
of accountability are needed: personnel
and tactical. The only way this can be
achieved and maintained is by aggressive
span-of-control management. More than
anything else, the ICS is a span-of-control,
resource-management system. Consider
the following NFPA 1561 citations:
5.1.6 The command structure for each
incident shall maintain an effective supervisory
span of control at each level of the
organization.
A.5.1.6 A span of control of responders
between three and seven is considered
desirable most cases.
5.3.12 The incident commander shall
initiate an accountability and inventory
worksheet at the beginning of operations
and shall maintain that system throughout
operations.
Note the conflict within these citations.
For example, a span of control of three to
seven is considered ideal, yet the incident
commander is supposed to initiate – and
maintain – an accountability and inventory
worksheet throughout the incident. This
is silly; imagine an incident commander
fiddling with this worksheet throughout
a multi-alarm incident. How can the incident
commander maintain this inventory
worksheet of all resources and maintain the
ideal span of control at the command post?
Not only does this violate fundamental ICS
span of control, it doesn’t work. This is one
reason why many fire departments choose
to dump resource tracking responsibility on
somebody else, this person is often called
an “accountability officer.” Here’s a hint:
The presence of an “accountability officer”
is a reliable indicator that, first, the fire department
has not integrated accountability
into the Incident Command System, and,
second, it does not know how to achieve
and maintain tactical accountability (or, in
many cases, is not aware that it should).
The good news is that there has always
been an ICS position with unlimited
span of control and whose responsibility
it is to track resources: the staging area
manager. It’s no surprise that NFPA 1561
advises that resources should check in
with the staging area manager. Considering
that advice, guess which ICS position
Indicate 139 on Reader Service Card
fire departments should assign to assist
the incident commander with resource
tracking? The bad news is that resource
tracking is not tactical accountability.
Staging provides non-hazard-area
personnel accountability; the staging area
manager can quickly tell you where Engine
54 was sent (not where it is) and what
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