National Incident Management System (NIMS) Standards Review Panel Workshop Summary Report
The importance and need for full compliant implementation of NIMS nationwide was clearly demonstrated during the Hurricane Katrina event, which was clearly expressed in Secretary Chertoff's October 4, 2005 letter addressed to the State's governors. It states, ''Hurricane Katrina was a stark reminder of how critical it is for our nation to approach incident management in a coordinated, consistent, and efficient manner. We must be able to come together, at all levels of government, to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from any emergency or disaster. Our operations must be seamless and based on common incident management doctrine, because the challenges we face as a nation are far greater than capabilities of any one jurisdiction.'' The NIMS is a system/architecture for organizing response on a ''national'' level. It incorporations ICS as a main component of that structure (i.e., it institutionalizes ICS in NIMS). In a paper published on the NIMS Website, the following statements were made: ''NIMS represents a core set of doctrine, principles, terminology, and organizational processes to enable effective, efficient and collaborative incident management at all levels. To provide the framework for interoperability and compatibility, the NIMS is based on a balance between flexibility and standardization.'' Thus the NIC is challenged with the need to adopt quality SDO generated standards to support NIMS compliance, but in doing so maintain the flexibility necessary so that response operations can be tailored for the specific jurisdictional and geographical needs across the nation. In support of this large and complex challenge facing the NIC, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was asked to provide technical support to the NIC, through their DHS Science and Technology ? Standards Portfolio Contract, to help identify, review, and develop key standards for NIMS compliance. Upon examining the challenge, the following general process appears to be a reasonable approach for identifying and establishing existing standards that would be applicable to NIMS compliance. The suggested generalized steps to establishing existing SDO generated standards for NIMS compliance are: (1) establish search criteria from the NIMS and its support documents, (2) search SDO databases to identify key existing nationally and/or internationally recognized standards that have potential application to NIMS compliance needs, (3) review the identified standards against the specific component needs of the NIMS, (4) identify the pertinent aspects/components of those identified standards that clearly address specific NIMS compliance needs, (5) establish a process to adopt the pertinent standards, which includes the generation of formalized FEMA Guidance that identifies the specific NIMS component compliance needs addressed in the respective standard, (6) develop performance criteria for which to measure compliance with the identified NIMS components addressed by the respective adopted standard, and (7) adopt the standard, publish the guidance and performance criteria, and incorporate it into routine FEMA/NIC NIMS management operations. This review process will also help identify real gaps in standards for which new NIMS specific standards should be developed. To jump start this process and hopefully identify some key ''low hanging fruit'' standards the NIC could use to begin such a process, a panel of first-responder experts (familiar with the current standards of common use in the first-responder community) from various response disciplines was formed and a workshop held. The workshop included a pre-workshop information gathering process. This report discusses the workshop and its findings in detail.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 877557
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-15574; 400904120; TRN: US200608%%418
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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