This morning my inbox was inundated with notices from FEMA and from colleagues about the release of the ‘refreshed’ NIMS, which has finally occurred at almost exactly 18 months after the draft of this document was released.  You can find the new document here. 

As I’m reading through the updated document, there are a few things catching my eye:

• The term ‘center management system’ has apparently been scrapped, thankfully. First of all, there should not be a separate system for managing emergency operations centers (EOCs) and similar facilities.  I’ve seen the greatest success come from an organization model that mirrors ICS.  Second, the acronym CMS is most commonly related to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, particularly in regard to the CMS rules for healthcare facility preparedness.  (Want to know more about this?  See my article here)
• Multi-Agency Coordination as a concept is briefly defined and referenced often without being described enough. It’s such an essential concept of incident management, yet it’s being paid very little heed. There is material on a MAC Group, which, while an implementer of multi-agency coordination at a policy level, is not the only multi-agency coordination that takes places within incident management.
• The final version still uses the term ‘EOC Director’.  This is a term that is fundamentally incorrect when held to ICS doctrine.  Those in charge of facilities in ICS are called managers.  An EOC, even a virtual one, functions as a facility.  Similarly, the EOC analogs to the command staff, should be referred to as ‘management staff’ in an EOC, not command staff.
• In the draft there were nearly two pages of references to federal EOC-like facilities. It was unnecessary and irrelevant to the document.  Thankfully those references and descriptions were removed.
• One of my favorite graphics continues to be used! Figure 10 on page 48 is, to me, one of the most meaningful graphics in all of emergency management.  It pays heed to all critical elements in a response and shows the flow of requests and assistance.
• I’m a big fan of the Essential Elements of Information (EEI) concept included in the Incident Information section of the document. This should serve as a foundation to all situation assessment and size up documents in all public safety disciplines, moving forward.
• The appendices offer some additional information, but are largely redundant of the core document.

Overall, NIMS 3.0 is a good document to move forward with.  While there are some elements that I don’t necessarily agree with, none of them are damaging to our field of practice.  While NIMS remains our core doctrine for response, what is missing from this document that we saw heavily included in earlier versions was the concept of integrating NIMS into other aspects of emergency management.  Primarily, it is something that must be prepared for.  It simply isn’t enough to include a one-liner in your emergency plans saying that you are using NIMS.  The elements of NIMS, and not just ICS, but things like EOC management, multi-agency coordination, resource management, and joint information management, need to be fully engrained in your plans.  Plans serve as the foundation for preparedness, so what is in our plans must be trained on and exercised in a continuous cycle.  I would have liked to have seen some very apparent reference to the National Preparedness Goal in this document.  Otherwise, it appears to many that these doctrine are unrelated.

Now that the center management system is gone and they were less heavy handed with EOC management concepts, I wonder what that means for training related to EOC management.  The current FEMA curriculum on EOC management is simply horrible (thus why I’ve created EOC management courses for various jurisdictions).

What are your thoughts on the NIMS refresh?  What did they do well?  What did they miss? Was it too safe with too few changes?  Were there other changes needed to improve our coordination of incident management?

As always, thanks for reading!

© 2017 – Timothy Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC