Tag emergency planning

ICS Doesn’t Solve Incident Problems

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been seeing another uptick in people espousing use of the Incident Command System (ICS) as a solution to incident management problems which far exceed what ICS actually is or does. Time and again I read posts and comments speaking of ICS as if it is the only thing needed for successful incident management. It appears that people think that ICS will solve problems. It doesn’t. People solve problems. Use of ICS can facilitate some of that problem solving, but people are still required. ICS won’t dictate what the priorities are of any given incident. It won’t tell you who is in charge of the incident. What I’m seeing in many of these posts seems to indicate a continued misunderstanding of what ICS is and is not and a false sense of security that seems to go with that.

These kinds of statements take me back to a stakeholder interview I conducted about 12 years ago, several months after the area was struck by a major hurricane. I asked what needs they had to better prepare for future incidents and the response was something akin to ‘Oh, we’re totally prepared now that we’ve had ICS training’. Let that statement sink in for a moment. They had no concerns about the severe lack of emergency plans or resources for the jurisdiction. Even knowing that functional issues such as swift water rescue or mass care were serious areas for improvement from the hurricane response, he felt they were ready for whatever might come solely because of ICS training. The false sense of security is frightening and extremely concerning, especially since this statement came from the town’s fire chief.

ICS is a great box of tools, with standards of organizational management practice and resources that support the incident management organization. It’s great for aligning different agencies and organizations into a temporary organization with common purpose. The use of ICS solves a lot of problems with our incident management organization, but it doesn’t solve incident problems. ICS doesn’t make evacuation decisions. ICS doesn’t figure out how to deal with contaminated first responders. ICS doesn’t solve the problems of a community without potable water. ICS doesn’t make resource allocation decisions. These are problems that people need to solve. While the benefits of ICS certainly set us up for more effective problem solving, ICS does not solve incident problems. While we may have policies on the use of ICS, ICS itself is not a policy. While our plans may call for the use of ICS, ICS itself is not a plan. While the use of ICS is a standard for organizing our response, ICS itself is not a standard for what we do in that response.

How have we come to this fundamental misunderstanding? The biggest exposure people have to ICS is through training. If you aren’t familiar with my decade+ crusade, ICS Training Sucks, I encourage you to take a look. The principal issue being shortfalls in the current curriculum. Specifically, there are a lot of gaps in the current ICS curriculum used in the US (which commonly serves as the basis for curricula used in other nations). There are so many gaps that the courses don’t even accomplish many of their own objectives properly, much less actually accomplish the goals of helping people understand and use ICS. Through my rants on ICS training, I have rarely thrown shade at ICS instructors, as they are doing the best they can with what they have, but I think instructors need to shoulder some of the responsibility for such a fundamental and not uncommon misunderstanding. Identifying what ICS is and isn’t is generally one of the first things covered in any introductory ICS training, and it’s up to instructors to communicate this clearly and ensure that course participants understand, regardless of how the course material addresses it. Being able to discern and explain what ICS is and is not is a foundational element of knowledge for anyone expected to use ICS or work within an ICS organization.

Statements people make on ICS often draw my attention and I’m quite commonly disappointed by the lack of understanding that people aren’t even aware of. We need to speak about such things clearly and factually. The implementation of ICS, especially advanced concepts, can be challenging, but the fundamentals should be common knowledge among those working as first responders, in emergency management, and related fields. I see ICS literacy as becoming a larger and larger issue, and one that needs to be addressed soon.

Off to refill my tea, as ICS won’t do that for me either.

©2026 Tim Riecker, CEDP – The Contrarian Emergency Manager

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

The EOC is About Bureaucracy, not Response

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Take a deep breath. It’s going to be OK. Really.

The National Incident Management System (NIMS) gives us the definition of an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) as “locations where staff from multiple agencies typically come together to address imminent threats and hazards and to provide coordinated support to incident command, on-scene personnel, and/or other EOCs.”

I’ll agree with this, but I’ll also suggest this isn’t a complete definition.

EOCs are really about building a bridge between emergency needs and our daily bureaucracy. In the context of response, we have a given set of agencies and organizations, such as first responders and others, that operate in that arena almost exclusively. Their bureaucracies are actually built around their response missions. They are generally built for speed and are supported by procedures and policies to support this. But during a large emergency or disaster, the needs of the incident exceed the capabilities of these response forces, requiring other, less traditional, agencies and organizations to not only provide support, but services as well. While we have seen an increase in these ‘non-traditional’ responders becoming involved, it doesn’t occur with enough frequency to make it a standard of practice. Rather, the focus in these agencies and organizations is still their daily missions, of which the vast majority is not disaster related. Their bureaucracies are built for the day-to-day, not for speed. This is all OK. Bureaucracy isn’t a four-letter word, but in the world of emergency and disaster management we need to understand why certain bureaucracies are built the way they are and figure out how to flex them to shorten reaction time.

Enter the EOC – a room (physical, virtual, in hybrid) where the intent is for bureaucracy and speed to awkwardly coexist. While our traditional response agencies and their counterparts (often at higher levels of government) will always be needed to contribute, the EOC isn’t built just for them. The EOC is also built for those who don’t respond with lights and sirens, but are just as important to supporting our communities during times of disaster.

We need to consider that disasters offer extraordinary circumstances with problems that can’t be solved by traditional means. We need to be creative. We also need to recognize how interconnected all facets of our community lifelines are. In order to conquer the extraordinary, we need everyone. We need to identify the capabilities and capacities held by agencies and organizations we might not typically see involved in an incident. Take a look through the list of departments your own city, village, or county has. The Clerk’s Office? The Planning Department? The Purchasing Department? The Office for Mental Health? The IT Department? Office for the Aging? Child and Family Services? Human Resources? Weights and Measures? There are so many more.

The intent of the EOC is to bring together representatives of these agencies and organizations to help streamline their assistance and support. The EOC should cut the proverbial red tape, but key to that is ensuring that each organization is properly represented. With no disrespect intended toward middle managers, as they often are the ones who really run an organization, EOCs require representation from executive-level leadership of these agencies and organizations. The EOC needs the people who have authority to cut through red tape when required.

So how do we approach this in emergency management: APOETE.

Assessing – Seek first to understand. Identify what agencies and organizations may be needed and when. What do they have? What can they do? What are their limitations?

Planning – Integrate them into emergency planning and encourage them to develop their own emergency plans that address they can work within their own bureaucracies.

Organizing – Meet with them and meet collectively. Bring representatives onto working groups that work in preparedness, response, and/or recovery (consider the Community Lifelines as a place to start). This promotes mutual understanding and inclusiveness.

Equipping and Systems – Ensure that all partners have access to the systems used to support incident management.

Training and Exercises – Broaden the invite lists for training and exercises to help these partners gain knowledge and become more involved.

In the end, it’s about working together toward a common cause, aka unity of effort. To maximize the utility of our EOCs, we need to stop looking at an EOC through the lens of the first responder. Flip that perspective and begin looking at the EOC through the lens of government bureaucracy. Consider what these partners need to be successful. How and when can we streamline? Don’t try to turn them into first responders – that’s the wrong expectation. Rather, we need to meet them where they are, respect what they do, and understand why they have certain protocols in place. That will give us a foundation of understanding to work from.

End note: I’ll also suggest that this reality is another reason why ICS-based organizational models for EOCs are less than effective. The organization of an EOC needs to serve a different purpose than what we often try to force it into. Check out the Incident Support Model as a great alternative.

© 2025 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

Revisiting POETE

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

One of my most popular posts has been my original post on POETE from July 2014. In the 11+ years has passed since that post, I continue leveraging the concept in every way I can. In case you’ve not heard of the concept, I certainly urge you to click the link above and read my original post. Briefly, POETE stands for Planning, Organizing, Equipping, Training, and Exercises. These are collectively known as the elements of preparedness. POETE is more than a checklist to me. It’s a strategic lens for realistically building and sustaining capabilities. Whether you are building a new emergency operations plan, launching a new public health preparedness initiative, or refining multiagency coordination activities, POETE offers a structured way to think through what takes to help ensure these endeavors are implementation-ready.

While I’ve written on these in the past, my continued and diverse application of POETE has broadened my perspective on application, so here are some fresh thoughts.

Assessing – On occasion, I throw an A in front of the acronym for Assessing. While assessments are an early activity of Planning, there are also plenty of stand-alone assessment activities which should be regarded of their own accord. Assessments can and should inform everything else we do in preparedness. Good assessments can provide us with justification for certain activities and investments and can often give us a data-driven approach. Along with many of the risk assessments common across emergency management, like the Threat, Hazard Identification, and Risk Assessment (THIRA), I’d also suggest that (well written) after-action reports (AARs) can also do the job. A well-developed AAR for an incident, event, or exercise can provide objective analysis of observed activities or discussions. When writing an AAR, we should always keep in mind that part of achieving the goal of improvement may involve requests and justifications for funding.

Planning – I’ve written a lot on the topic of emergency planning through the years. Overall, my take on most emergency plans is that they suck. Horribly. They aren’t worth the time, money, or effort invested in writing them. So many people go about it wrong. A true plan needs to be a blueprint for action. Good plans are operationally-focused, guiding decisions and actions. They should not just be theory and policy, as so many are. At best, I’d call something like that a framework, but it’s certainly not a plan.

Organizing – Organizing is largely about structure, roles, and responsibilities, but you can’t even get there without first building relationships and partnerships. Everything we do in emergency management is about relationships. It’s about knowing who has the thing you need – be it a physical resource, specialized knowledge, or specific authority. Last week I wrote a new piece on Community Lifelines. The central activity of doing anything with Community Lifelines is building relationships. Once those relationships are in place, then other activities will follow.

Equipping – I’ve always been very big on tools matching the mission. Equipment in this context means any and all resources available to us. The key aspect of this is alignment. Are the tools we use matching up to our threats, our people, and our procedures? While it’s understandable to have to update procedures to match a new resource, we should be very cautious about the resource dictating procedure. Our resources need to work for us, not the other way around.

Training – I feel like we have been gradually moving away from compliance being the center of the training universe. Yes, there is still plenty of training that is required for various purposes – there should be and there will always be. But I’ve been getting more requests from clients to develop custom training because they realize that little to no training exists to meet their needs. More people are realizing, for example, that ICS training is absolutely not the fit for EOC staff. Similarly, they are realizing that existing EOC training might begin to approach their needs, but the implementation of their specific EOC model really requires customized training. Overall, training needs to be role-based. We need to be training people what we want them to do. We need to give them the knowledge to succeed, not just generalized training for a broad group hoping that people will be able to ascertain what pertains to them and what does not. We also need to realize that, since most training in emergency management is response-oriented, the things they are being trained to do are things they don’t do often and/or don’t do them under pressure. So frequency of training and job aids are essential to their success.

Exercises – The thing I do the highest volume of. Luckily, I love to do them! Exercises are about testing our plans and capabilities before they are tested for real. Pay attention to good exercise design and never forget that the end product is a worthwhile AAR. I still see so many softball AARs out there. AARs that pat people on the back for a job well done while only acknowledging the superficial opportunities to improve – often times because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I don’t ever write an AAR for the purpose of offending anyone, but if we don’t expose what doesn’t work, the chances of it ever being addressed are so much lower than if we had documented it.

While we have the acronym of (A)POETE, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not intended to be a linear process. It’s iterative and constantly in need of attention. Each component is informed by the others. While I generally believe that Planning is still the foundation of preparedness and it should heavily influence all other elements, those other elements can still influence Planning. POETE activities should be used to build our capabilities. These activities help us prepare with purpose, focus, and intent.

© 2025 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

Replacing ESFs with Community Lifelines

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 1 Comment

I’ve written previously about my concerns with using Emergency Support Functions in many state, local, territorial, and tribal (SLTT) emergency operations centers. The ESF structure was never intended for SLTT use, and while it may have some successes with the largest of the states and metropolitan areas, it’s generally not a good fit.

I’ve also written previously about Community Lifelines and the benefits thereof. Consider, however, that Community Lifelines, while designed originally for the organization of information by FEMA regional offices when they monitor a disaster, can have much broader applicability. We can and should be using Community Lifelines across every phase / mission area of Emergency Management.

Lately I’ve been having more and more conversations about Community Lifelines with clients, at conferences, and with others who are interested in learning more about them and how to use them. Across emergency management we often find or are provided with approaches to problems that are single-use. We should regularly explore opportunities to expand those single-use applications, increasing the utility of the concept at hand. Given the shortcomings of ESFs for most jurisdictions and the much broader applicability of Community Lifelines for every jurisdiction under the sun, I suggest that Community Lifelines cannot only be operationalized to be a viable replacement for ESFs, they can do so much more. Here are my arguments in support of replacing ESFs with a Community Lifelines – driven organization in SLTT EOCs as well as emergency management programs as a whole:

  1. Community Lifelines are community-focused and more comprehensive of the needs of a community, whereas ESFs are driven by functions which may have limited capabilities or capacities in any given jurisdiction.
  2. Community Lifelines can be operationalized just like ESFs, with primary and support agencies and organizations.
  3. Community Lifelines are focused on stabilizing critical services with built-in mechanisms for assessing impacts and establishing priorities.
  4. Community Lifelines more directly support the inclusion of the private sector, along with government, NGOs, and quasi-government owners/operators.
  5. Community Lifelines provide better preparedness and resilience initiatives.
  6. Community Lifelines provide us with a basis for measuring progress across all phases or mission areas. The only thing we can measure in an ESF is what we might have available to leverage in a response.
  7. Community Lifelines connect resilience, response, and recovery since they are the focal point. While the National Response Framework and National Recovery Framework still have national relevance, the transition from ESFs to Recovery Support Functions (RSFs) is challenging at best.
  8. The inclusion of Community Lifelines in our EOC structure is easy and agnostic to the organizational model used in the EOC. ESFs include functions that are part of the typical overhead management of an EOC, such as ESF 5 (Information and Planning), ESF 7 (Logistics), and ESF 15 (External Affairs), which is an awkward integration.
  9. Community Lifelines lend to better partnerships and preparedness. The ESF plans of most jurisdictions are truly little more than a general scope of the ESF with a list of participating agencies and organizations.

We need to change our mindset of emergency management being centered on response. Yes, response is the big shiny thing. It’s the thing we practice for and anticipate. A more wholistic and comprehensive approach is available to us, however, by using Community Lifelines as the foundation of our work. I suggest that jurisdictions develop Community Lifeline Implementation Plans, which are fundamentally strategic plans identifying how Community Lifelines can be used in Prevention/Protection/Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery. Consider how the relationships forged with the owners/operators of Community Lifeline partners can support each of those phases and activities, increasing the resiliency of our community as a whole by making each partner more resilient; and by understanding and preparing for the response and recovery needs of our community through the collective effort of Community Lifeline partners.

Emergency management is more than response. It is a comprehensive effort to support our communities before, during, and after disaster.

© 2025 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

ICS: Problems and Perceptions

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 4 Comments

Oddly enough, I’ve recently seen a spate of LinkedIn posts espousing the benefits of the Incident Command System (ICS). Those who have been reading my material for a while know that I’m a big proponent of ICS, though I am highly critical of the sub-par curriculum that we have been using for decades to teach ICS. The outcome is an often poorly understood and implemented system resulting in limited effectiveness.

Yes, ICS is a great tool, if implemented properly. Yet most implementations I see aren’t properly conducted. To further muddy these waters, I see emergency plans everywhere that commit our responders and officials to using ICS – this is, after all, part of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) requirement that many have – yet they don’t use it.

So why isn’t ICS being used properly or even at all? Let’s start with plans. Plans get written and put up on a proverbial shelf – physical or digital. They are often not shared with the stakeholders who should have access to them. Even less frequently are personnel trained in their actual roles as identified and defined in plans. Some of those roles are within the scope of ICS while some are not. The bottom line is that many personnel, at best, are only vaguely familiar with what they should be doing in accordance with plans. So, when an incident occurs, most people don’t think to reference the plan, and they flop around like a fish out of water trying to figure out what to do. They make things up. Sure, they often try their best, assessing what’s going on and finding gaps to fill, but without a structured system in place and in the absence (or lack of referencing) of the guidance that a quality plan should offer, efficiency and effectiveness are severely decreased, and some gaps aren’t even recognized or anticipated.

Next, let’s talk about ICS training. Again, those who have been reading my work for a while have at least some familiarity with my criticism of ICS training. To be blunt, it sucks. Not only does the content of courses not even align with course objectives, the curriculum overall doesn’t teach us enough of HOW to actually use ICS. My opinion: We need to burn the current curriculum to the ground and start over. Course updates aren’t enough. Full rewrites, a complete reimagining of the curriculum and what we want to accomplish with it, needs to take place.

Bad curriculum aside… For some reason people think that ICS training will solve all their problems. Why? One reason I believe is that we’ve oversold it. Part of that is most certainly due to NIMS requirements. Not that I think the requirements, conceptually, are a bad thing, but I think they cause people to think that if it’s the standard that we are all required to learn, it MUST be THE thing that we need to successfully manage the incident. I see people proudly boasting that they’ve completed ICS300 or ICS400. OK, that’s great… but what can you actually do with that? You’ve learned about the system, but not so much of how to actually use it. Further, beyond the truth that ICS training sucks, it’s also not enough to manage an incident. ICS is a tool of incident management. It’s just one component of incident management, NOT the entirety of incident management. Yes, we need to teach people how to use ICS, but we also need to teach the other aspects of incident management.

We also don’t use ICS enough. ICS is a contingency system. It’s not something we generally use every day, at least to a reasonably full extent. Even our first responders only use elements of ICS on a regular basis. While I don’t expect everyone to be well practiced in the nuances and specific applications of ICS, we still need more practice at using more of the system. It’s not the smaller incidents where our failure to properly implement ICS is the concern – it’s the larger incidents. It’s easy to be given a scenario and to draw out on paper what the ICS org chart should look like to manage the scenario. It’s a completely different thing to have the confidence and ego in check to make the call for additional resources – not the tactical ones – but for people to serve across a number of ICS positions. Responders tend to have a lot of reluctance to do so. Add to that the fact that most jurisdictions simply don’t have personnel even remotely qualified to serve in most of those positions. So not only are we lacking the experience in using ICS on larger incidents, we also don’t have experience ‘ramping up’ the organization for a large response. An increase in exercises, of course, is the easy answer, but exercises require time, money, and effort to implement.

One last thing I’ll mention on this topic is about perspective. One of the posts I read recently on LinkedIn espoused all the things that ICS did. While I understand the intent of their statements, the truth is that ICS does nothing. ICS is nothing more than a system on paper. It takes people to implement it. ICS doesn’t do things; PEOPLE do these things. The use of ICS to provide structure and processes to the chaos, if properly done, can reap benefits. I think that statements claiming all the things that ICS can do for us, without inserting the critical human factor into the statement, lends to the myth of ICS being our savior. It’s not. It must be implemented – properly – by people to even stand a chance.

Bottom line: we’re not there yet when it comes to incident management, including ICS. I dare say too many people are treating it as a hobby, not a profession. We have a standard, now let’s train people on it PROPERLY and practice it regularly.

©2024 Timothy Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

Culture of Preparedness – a Lofty Goal

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

September is National Preparedness Month here in the US. As we soon head into October, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on what we’ve accomplished during the month, or even elsewhere in the year. While National Preparedness Month is an important thing to mark and to remind us of how important it is to be prepared, over the past several years I’ve come to question our approaches to community preparedness. What are we doing that’s actually moving the needle of community preparedness in a positive direction? Flyers and presentations and preparedness kits aren’t doing it. While I can’t throw any particular numbers into the mix, I think most will agree that our return on investment is extremely low. Am I ready to throw all our efforts away and say it’s not making any difference at all? Of course not. Even one person walking away from a presentation who makes changes within their household to become better prepared is important. But what impact are we having overall?

Culture of preparedness is a buzz phrase used quite a bit over the last number of years. What is a culture of preparedness? An AI assisted Google search tells me that a culture of preparedness is ‘a system that emphasizes the importance of preparing for and responding to disasters, and that everyone has a role to play in doing so.’ Most agree that we don’t have a great culture of preparedness across much of the US (and many other nations) and that we need to improve our culture of preparedness. But how?

People love to throw that phrase into the mix of a discussion, claiming that improving the culture of preparedness will solve a lot of issues. They may very well be correct, but it’s about as effective as a doctor telling you that you will be fine from the tumor they found once a cure for cancer is discovered. Sure, the intent is good, but the statement isn’t helpful right now. We need to actually figure out HOW to improve our culture of preparedness. We also need to recognize that in all likelihood it will take more than one generation to actually realize the impacts of deliberate work toward improvement.

The time has come for us to stop talking about how our culture of preparedness needs improvement and to actually do something about it. There isn’t one particular answer or approach that will do this. Culture of preparedness is a whole community concept. We rightfully put a lot of time, effort, and money into ensuring that our responders (broad definition applied) are prepared, because they are the ones we rely on most. I’d say their culture of preparedness is decent (maybe a B-), but we can do a lot better. (If you think my assessment is off, please check out my annual reviews of the National Preparedness Report and let me know if you come to a different conclusion). There is much more to our community, however, than responders. Government administration, businesses, non-government organizations, and people themselves compose the majority of it, and unfortunately among these groups is where our culture of preparedness has the largest gaps.

As with most of my posts, I don’t actually have a solution. But I know what we are doing isn’t getting us to where we want to be. I think the solution, though, lies in studying people, communities, and organizations and determining why they behave and feel the way they do, and identifying methodologies, sticks, and carrots that can help attain an improved culture of preparedness over time. We must also ensure that we consider all facets of our communities, inclusive of gender identity, race, culture, income, citizenship status, and more. We need people who know and study such things to help guide us. The followers of Thomas Drabek. The Kathleen Tierneys* of the world. Sociologists. Anthropologists. Psychologists. Organizational psychologists.  

A real, viable culture of preparedness, in the present time, is little more than a concept. We need to change our approach from using this as a buzz phrase in which everyone in the room nods their heads, to a goal which we make a deliberate effort toward attaining. A problem such as this is one where we can have a true union of academia and practice, with academics and researchers figuring out how to solve the problem and practitioners applying the solutions, with a feedback loop of continued study to identify and track the impacts made, showing not only the successes we (hopefully) attain, but also how we can continue to improve.

*Note: I don’t know Dr. Tierney personally and it is not my intent to throw her under the proverbial bus for such a project. I cite her because her writing on related topics is extremely insightful. I highly recommend Disasters: A Sociological Approach.

© 2024 Timothy Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

ICS Training Sucks – Progress Inhibited by Bias

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 5 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve written directly toward my years-long rally against our current approach to Incident Command System (ICS) training. Some of these themes I’ve touched on in the past, but recent discussions on this and other topics have gotten the concept of our biases interfering with progress stuck in my head.

It is difficult for us, as humans, to move forward, to be truly progressive and innovative, when we are in a way contaminated by what we know about the current system which we wish to improve. This knowledge brings with it an inherent bias – good, bad, or otherwise – which influences our vision, reasoning, and decisions. Though on the other hand, knowledge of the existing system gives us a foundation from which we can work, often having awareness of what does and does not work.

I’m sure there have been some type of psychological studies done on such things. I’ve certainly thought about, in my continued rally against our current approach to ICS training, what that training could look like if we set individuals to develop something new if they’ve never seen the current training. Sure, the current training has a lot of valuable components, but overall, it’s poorly designed, with changes and updates through decades still based upon curriculum that was poorly developed, though with good intentions, so long ago.

In recent months, having had discussions with people about various things across emergency management that require improvement, from how we assess preparedness, to how we develop plans, to how we respond, and even looking at the entire US emergency management enterprise itself. Every one of these discussions, trying to imagine what a new system or methodology could look like, with every one of these people (myself included), were infected by an inherent bias that stemmed from what is. Again, I’m left wondering, what would someone build if they had no prior knowledge of what currently exists.

Of course, what would be built wouldn’t be flawless. To some solutions, those of us in the know may even shake our heads, saying that certain things have already been tried but were proven to fail (though perhaps under very different circumstances which may no longer be relevant). Some solutions, however, could be truly innovative.

The notion, perhaps, is a bit silly, as I’m not sure we could expect anyone to build, for example, a new ICS curriculum, without having subject matter expertise in ICS (either their own or through SMEs who would guide and advise on the curriculum). These SMEs, inevitably, would have taken ICS training somewhere along their journey.

All that said, I’m not sure it’s possible for us to eliminate our bias in many of these situations. Even the most visionary of people can’t shed that baggage. But we can certainly improve how we approach it. I think a significant strategy would be having a facilitator who is a champion of the goal and who understands the challenges, who can lead a group through the process. I’d also suggest having a real-time ‘red team’ (Contrarian?) element as part of the group, who can signal when the group is exercising too much bias brought forth from what they know of the current implementation.

In the example of reimagining ICS training, I’d suggest that the group not be permitted to even access the current curriculum during this effort. They should also start from the beginning of the instructional design process, identifying needs and developing training objectives from scratch, rather than recycling or even referencing the current curriculum. The objectives really need to answer the question – ‘What do we want participants to know or do at the completion of the course?’. Levels of training are certainly a given, but perhaps we need to reframe to what is used elsewhere in public safety, such as the OSHA 1910.120 standard which uses the levels of Awareness, Operations, Technician, and Command. Or the DHS model which uses Awareness, Performance, and Management & Planning. We need to further eliminate other bias we bring with us, such as the concept of each level of training only consisting of one course. Perhaps multiple courses are required to accomplish what is needed at each level? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but all of these things, and more, should be considered in any real discussion about a new and improved curriculum.

Of course, any discussions on new and improved ICS curriculum need to begin at the policy level, approving the funding and the effort and reinforcing the goal of having a curriculum that better serves our response efforts.

How would you limit the influence of bias in innovation?

© 2024 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

Preparing for Community Lifelines Implementation

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 2 Comments

In all great ideas, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Implementing new concepts often requires preparations to ensure that the implementation goes smoothly. We often rush to implementation, perhaps excited for the results, perhaps not thinking through the details. Without proper preparation, that implementation can fail miserably. Integrating and implementing the Community Lifelines is no exception.

Just like everything else we do in preparedness, we should turn to the capability elements of planning, organizing, equipping, training, and exercises (POETE) to guide our preparedness for Community Lifeline implementation.

Planning and Organizing

I’m coupling these two capability elements together as they so strongly go hand-in-hand. Determining how you want to use Community Lifelines is an important early step. I’d suggest developing a Community Lifeline Implementation Plan for your jurisdiction that not only identify how you will use them in response and recovery operations, but details of how their use fits within your response and recovery management structure, how information will flow, who is responsible for what, how information is reported, and to who it is reported. The Implementation Plan should also outline the preparedness steps needed and how and where information will be catalogued.

I’ve seen several Community Lifeline integrations across local, county, and state jurisdictions, these mostly being visual status displays, but there can be some complexity in how we even get to that display.

We all know from CPG-101 that forming a planning team is the first step of emergency planning. While not itself really the capability element of Organizing, the stakeholders that will be assembled for this will extend across all capability elements and into response and recovery operations.

Before identifying stakeholders, we need to examine each Community Lifeline down to the sub-component levels, which first necessitates determining which components and sub-components are applicable to your jurisdiction. For example, within the Transportation Community Lifeline, if your jurisdiction has no Aviation resources or infrastructure, you may choose to not include that component.

Once you have made the determination as to what components and sub-components of each Community Lifeline will be included, it’s not time to form your planning teams for each. Depending on the size of your jurisdiction, you could form teams at the Community Lifeline level, the component level, or the sub-component level. You could even use different approaches for each (i.e. The Community Lifeline of Water Systems may only involve a few stakeholders to address all components and sub-components, whereas Health and Medical may require distinct teams for each component). Since much of the Community Lifelines is centered on or strongly relates to critical infrastructure, many of our stakeholders will be from the private sector. Hopefully these are partners you have engaged with before, but if not, this is a great opportunity to do so.

In meeting with each of these stakeholders/stakeholder groups, providing them with an orientation to the Community Lifelines concept will be important. Be sure to talk about this within the contexts of whole-community preparedness, public-private partnerships, critical infrastructure, and the five mission areas. This should include the expectation for these to be long-term working groups that will provide information updates before, during, and after a disaster. It will be important to obtain from each the following information (at minimum) for each function and/or facility:

  • Legal owners and operators
  • Primary and alternate points of contact (and contact info for each) (Note that these should be emergency/24 hour contacts)
  • Existing emergency plans
  • Protection activities
  • Prevention activities
  • Mitigation activities
  • Preparedness activities
  • Response and recovery priorities
  • Critical continuity and supply chain issues
  • Sensitive information concerns

Processes will need to be mapped to identify how information will be obtained in an incident from the owners/operators of each facility or function, what information will be expected, in what format, and how often. Internal (EOC) procedures should identify how this information will be received, organized, and reported and how it will influence operational priorities for response and recovery. Since the visual representation of the Community Lifelines is the face of the system, you should also determine what the benchmarks are within each Community Lifeline, component, and sub-component for differentiating between status (i.e. what failures will bring status from green to yellow, and from yellow to red) and how the status of one may influence the status of others.

Equipment (and Systems)

It is important to catalogue the information you obtain from preparedness activities as well as in implementation. Consider GIS integrations, as there is an abundance of information that involves geolocation. I’ll make a special shout out here to the Community Lifeline Status System (CLSS) project, which is funded by the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate and is being developed by contract to G&H International. When rolled out, the CLSS will be available at no cost to every jurisdiction in the US to support Community Lifeline integration. Having been fortunate enough to get a private in-depth tour of the system, I’m thoroughly impressed. The CLSS is based on Arc GIS and provides a lot of customizable space to store all this preparedness information.

Using a system such as CLSS to display and share Community Lifelines information is also a benefit. While most displays I’ve seen simply show the icon and status color for each Community Lifeline, an interactive dashboard type of system can help provide additional context and important information. This is something CLSS also provides.

Training and Exercises

As with any new plans or processes, training is an important part of supporting implementation. Training audiences will include:

  • EOC personnel
  • Owners/Operators of Community Lifelines infrastructure
  • Officials who will receive Community Lifelines information

Proper training requires that different audiences should receive training to address their specific needs.

Similarly, exercises should purposely test these processes, and use of Community Lifelines should be incorporated into exercises often. Community Lifelines status and information should be engaged in exercises to inform and support decision making.

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If you already know the benefits of the Community Lifelines, hopefully you see the advantages of adequate preparedness to get the most out of them. The stakeholder groups you assemble to support planning should be everlasting, as information on their vulnerabilities, capabilities, and activities are likely to change over time. Beyond direct Community Lifeline applications, these are all great partners for a variety of emergency management activities to support the whole community. The preparedness efforts, and maintenance thereof (sorry, but it’s not just a one-time thing) is a significant investment (and could likely be a full-time job for even a moderately sized jurisdiction) but it should pay incredible dividends over and over again.

Are you using Community Lifelines? What have you learned about the need to prepare for their use?

© 2024 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

CDC Forgot About Planning

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 2 Comments

In late February, CDC released the highly anticipated notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) for the 2024-2028 Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) grant. The general concept of the grant wasn’t a big surprise, as they had been promoting a move to their Response Readiness Framework (RRF). The timing of the new five-year grant cycle seems ideal to implement lessons learned from COVID-19, yet they are falling short.

I’ve reflected in the past on the preparedness capability elements of Planning, Organizing, Equipment/Systems, Training, and Exercises (POETE). I also often add Assessing to the front of that (APOETE). These preparedness elements are essentially the buckets of activity through which we categorize our preparedness activities.

In reviewing the ten program priorities of the RRF, I’m initially encouraged by the first priority: Prioritize a risk-based approach to all-hazards planning. Activity-wise, what this translates to in the NOFO is conducting a risk assessment. Solid start. Yet nowhere else is planning overtly mentioned. Within the NOFO some of the other priorities reflect on ensuring certain things are addressed in plans, such as health equity, but there is otherwise no direct push for planning. Buried within the NOFO (page 62) is a list of plans that must be shared with project officers upon request (under the larger heading of Administrative and Federal Requirements) but the development of any of these plans does not correlate to any priorities, strategies, or activities within the document.

As for the rest of APOETE, there is good direction on Organizing, Equipment and Systems, Training, and Exercises. While that’s all great, planning is the true foundation of preparedness and it is so obviously left out of this NOFO. Along with my general opinion that most emergency plans (across all sectors) are garbage, that vast majority of findings from numerous COVID-19 after-action reports I’ve written (which included two states and several county and local governments) noted the significant need for improved emergency plans. Further, the other preparedness elements (OETE) should all relate back to our plans. If we aren’t developing, improving, and updating plans, then the other activities will generally lack focus, direction, and relevance.

Understanding that this is the first year of a five-year grant cycle, some changes and clarification will occur as the cycle progresses, but as planning is a foundational activity, it should be immediately and directly tied to the results of the assessment this year’s grant calls for. Otherwise, the findings of the assessments are generally meaningless if we aren’t taking action and developing plans to address them. This is leaving us with a significant gap in preparedness. Someone at CDC didn’t think this through and it leaves me with a great deal of concern, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 response.

What are your thoughts on this?

© 2024 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

Properly Applying ICS in Function-Specific Plans

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

As with many of my posts, I begin with an observation of something that frustrates me. Through much of my career, as I review function-specific plans (e.g., shelter plans, point of distribution plans, debris management plans, mass fatality incident management plans) I see a lot of organization charts that are inserted into those plans. Almost always, the org chart is an application of a ‘full’ incident command system (ICS) org chart (Command, Command Staff, General Staff, and many subordinate positions). This is obviously suitable for a foundational emergency operations plan (EOP), an emergency operations center (EOC) plan, or something else that is very comprehensive in nature where this size and scope of an organization would be used, but function-specific plans are not that. This, to me, is yet another example of a misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and/or misuse of the principles of National Incident Management System (NIMS) and ICS.

Yes, we fundamentally have a mandate to use ICS, which is also an effective practice, but not every function and facility we activate within our response and recovery operations requires a full organization or an incident management team to run. The majority of applications of a function-specific plan are within a greater response (such as activating a commodity POD during a storm response). As such, the EOP should have already been activated and there should already be an ‘umbrella’ incident management organization (e.g., ICS) in place – which means you are (hopefully) using ICS. Duplicating the organization within every function isn’t necessary. If we truly built out organizations according to every well intentioned (but misguided) plan, we would need several incident management teams just to run a Type 3 incident. This isn’t realistic, practical, or appropriate.

Most function-specific plans, when activated, would be organized within the Operations Section of an ICS organization. There is a person in charge of that function – depending on the level of the organization in which they are placed and what the function is, there is plenty of room for discussion on what their title would be, but I do know that it absolutely is NOT Incident Commander. There is already one of those and the person running a POD doesn’t get to be it. As for ‘command staff’ positions, if there is really a need for safety or public information activity (I’m not even going to talk about liaison) at these levels, these would be assistants, as there is (should be) already a Safety Officer or PIO as a member of the actual Command Staff. Those working within these capacities at the functional level should be coordinating with the principal Command Staff personnel. As for the ‘general staff’ positions within these functions, there is no need for an Operations Section as what’s being done (again, most of the time that’s where these functions are organized) IS operations. Planning and Logistics are centralized within the ICS structure for several reasons, the most significant being an avoidance of duplication of effort. Yes, for all you ICS nerds (like me) there is an application of branch level planning (done that) and/or branch level logistics that can certainly be necessary for VERY complex functional operations, but this is really an exception and not the rule – and these MUST interface with the principal General Staff personnel. As for Finance, there are similarly many reasons for this to be centralized within the primary ICS organization, which is where it should be.

We need to have flexibility balanced with practicality in our organizations. We also need to understand that personnel (especially those trained to serve in certain positions) are finite, so it is not feasible to duplicate an ICS structure for every operational function, nor is it appropriate. The focus should be on what the actual function does and how it should organize to best facilitate that. My suggestion is that if you are writing a plan, unless you REALLY understand ICS (and I don’t mean that you’ve just taken some courses), find someone who (hopefully) does and have a conversation with them. Talk through what you are trying to accomplish with your plan and your organization; everything must have a purpose so ask ‘why?’ and question duplication of effort. This is another reason why planning is a team sport and it’s important to bring the right people onto the team.

© 2024 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®