COMMAND SUPPORT: THE TIME HAS COME

摘要

Effective incident management is the critical foundation on which all incident safety rests. However, given the fact that the number of annual firefighter fatalities exceeds 100 and the number of injuries exceeds 80,000, the fire service needs to consider just how effective it is at managing incidents. The reality is that most instances in which firefighters are injured or killed result in the questioning of the incident's management. And when multiple firefighter fatalities occur, people question the function of command itself.rnAt a July 2000 meeting in Seattle, Washington, the National FirernService Incident Management System Consortium began discussions on changing the incident management system (IMS). One proposed change is to move the safety officer from command to the general staff. Another proposal is to create a "command support" function to assist the incident commander (IC), which I discuss below.