Question

Local community needs new emergency response plan You live in a particularly rural area in Pennsylvania, which – historically – has seen few great emergencies that required anything more than a local response. A long-time, well-known volunteer firefighter and EMT, you have recently been charged by your community with developing a local emergency response plan in line with the NIMS framework. What would your first few steps be to ensure NIMS continuity? What sort of emergencies do you think you might have to prepare for? How would you go about ensuring that the NIMS framework is consistently followed as time goes on?

Answer 1

NIMS (National Emergency Management System) is an approach to incidence management. in the United States. NIMS gives guideline to governmental and non governmental organization so that they can protect, mitigate as well as recover from incidence. they also help in resource and information management in case of incidence. in order to ensure continuity of NIMS in local emergency response plan, i must ensure the following-

1. first of all i must ensure proper command and management for the smooth functioning of the system, because the main purpose of NIMS is to properly plan, respond and finally recover from any incidence. so without proper command and management this is not possible.

2. there after we must prepare to meet the situation so that we can efficiently handle it. in the above case in order to meet the requirements of firefighter and EMT we must be prepared with required resources so that we can promptly solve the problem. because any delay in this case may have serious consequences.

3. then we must also think about proper resource management. A volunteer firefighter and EMT work to extinguish unwanted fire so that they can protect life and resources and hence they need proper training as well as various resources so that they can prevent themselves from hazard as well as extinguish fire.

4. other than this proper communication and information management is also needed to work efficiently by NIMS, because without proper information they can't identify the extent of incidence and the level of recovery work needed. the firefighters need to get timely information about fire so that they can take quick action and prevent major losses.

5. the system also needs supporting technology to work in the right manner. in above case also the firefighter system needs supporting technology through which they can work in better and efficient way.

6. a regular management and maintenance of the system is also essential so that the NIMS can serve the purpose protection, mitigation and recovery of incidence. because through maintenance we can ensure that all the system are up to date and there will not be any delay in service in case of emergency situation.

there are various emergency that we might face with volunteer firefighter and EMT such as recruitment and training of employees, because they need to be technically qualified enough to handle the situation properly, secondly the major problem faced by them is wild land fire. it is a growing problem for the nation as well as firefighter services. health and safety is another problem faced by them because fire may lead to many health hazards to people etc.

in order to ensure that NIMS framework is consistently being followed as time goes on we must focus on all above points as well as we must also ensure that all the guiding principle of NIMS is also being followed. there are three main guiding principle on which NIMS work and they are - flexibility so that unique approach to different problem may be adopted, Standardization so that we may have a predetermined general course of action to take and finally unity of effort because incidence management can we better done only when we work towards same goal.