The Noggin Blog

A few weeks ago, the team at Noggin attended the Australian Airports Association (AAA) National Conference, the pre-eminent aviation conference in the Asia-Pacific region. There, we learned all about the latest innovations in airport technology as well as new developments in best-practice principles.

AIIMS is the Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System. The nationally recognized incident management structure in Australia, AIIMS has wide command, control, and coordination applicability in fire, land management, and other emergency situations, as well as for non-emergency incidents.

California is ablaze. Northern California’s Camp Fire has already become the deadliest in the state’s history. The Woolsey fire, rampaging through heavily-populated Los Angeles and Ventura counties, is comparable in size to the city of Denver. For crisis leaders, it’s past time to dust of those corporate crisis plans and get serious about severe weather preparedness.

If you’re involved in emergency management in the U.S., you’ve probably heard of the Incident Command System (ICS). A key feature of the U.S. National Incident Management System (NIMS), ICS is an operational incident management structure that provides a standardized approach to the command, control, and coordination of emergency response in the U.S.

Been managing volunteers, especially disaster response volunteers, for the last few decades? Then, you’ve probably noticed a shift. There’re fewer long-term volunteers; new volunteers are harder to come by than ever; and your base of existing volunteers is serving historically short stints.

By now, the case for interoperability, especially the efficient transfer of relevant data between agencies – otherwise known as interoperability in information management – is clear. Just take a look at many post-emergency, after-action reports; most cite a lack of interagency cooperation as contributory to mission setbacks, or even failures. Of course, one of the best examples in recent memory: poor interagency cooperation between New York City responders during 11 September.

When it comes to disaster response, full-time staff usually gets heavy reinforcement from volunteers. Indeed, in the event of an emergency, volunteers, especially spontaneous, converging volunteers, are often the first on the field, providing much-needed first responder support, including search and rescue, first aid, damage and need assessment. It’s also not uncommon that volunteers numerically dominate the response effort. In Australia, for instance, rural fire services often average career staff to volunteer ratios that easily exceed 1:130.

So far this year, the U.S. has already been hit by six storms, excluding the recent Hurricane Florence, that were each severe enough to inflict at least $1 billion in damages. Together, these storms caused more than thirty deaths.

Hurricane Florence—which recently struck the Southeast U.S. leading to severe flooding in the Carolinas—caused an estimated $20 billion in damages, possibly higher given that estimates on the monetary cost are still being estimated, and led to more than forty deaths.

Resources and capabilities go hand in hand. Your team’s capabilities prove the crucial variable to success in the field. In other words, managing one (resources) without considering the other (capabilities) is a surefire way to undermine the success of your mission.

To be successful, incident managers need to get materials, supplies, technologies, and especially responders to the emergency site as quickly and efficiently as possible. But those same managers will tell you that getting resources to the right place at the right time is only half the battle. Attention also needs to be paid to ensuring the productivity of those resources once they reach the disaster. Here, however, managers and dispatchers confront capability roadblocks to effective resource management.