National Incident Management System

The National Incident Management System (NIMS) is a system used in the United States to coordinate emergency preparedness and incident management among various federal, state, and local agencies.

History
The National Incident Management System (NIMS) is a structured framework used nationwide for both governmental and nongovermental agencies to respond to natural disasters and or terrorist attacks at the local, state, and federal levels of government. (Hogan & Burstein, 2007)

The system's development was instigated on February 28, 2003 by President George W. Bush, who in Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD)-5, Management of Domestic Incidents directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to develop and administer the system. After the proposed system went through a period of vetting and coordination among federal agencies, NIMS was released by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on March 1, 2004.

The 2003 presidential directive required all federal agencies to adopt the NIMS and to use it in their individual domestic incident management and emergency prevention, preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation programs and activities. The directive also required Federal departments to make adoption of NIMS by State, tribal, and local organizations a condition for Federal preparedness assistance beginning in Fiscal Year 2005. In addition, all State, tribal, and local emergency personnel with a direct role in emergency preparedness, incident management or response were to have completed NIMS training by October 1, 2005. All State, tribal and local personnel with any type of emergency assignment must complete NIMS training by October 1, 2006.

Concepts and Principles
NIMS is based on an appropriate balance of flexibility and standardization:

Flexibility
NIMS provides a consistent, flexible and adjustable national framework within which government and private entities at all levels can work together to manage domestic incidents, regardless of their cause, size, location or complexity.

Standardization
NIMS provides a set of standard organizational structures, as well as requirements for processes, procedures and systems designed to improve operability among jurisdictions and disciplines in various areas.

Command and management
NIMS standard incident command structures are based on three key organizational systems:
 * The Incident Command System
 * Multi-agency Coordination (MAC) System
 * Public Information Systems

Preparedness
The range of deliberate, critical tasks and activities necessary to build, sustain, and improve the operational capability to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from domestic incidents. Preparedness is a continuous process. Preparedness involves efforts at all levels of government and between government and private-sector and nongovernmental organizations to identify threats, determine vulnerabilities, and identify required resources. Within the NIMS, preparedness is operationally focused on establishing guidelines, protocols, and standards for planning, training and exercises, personnel qualification and certification, equipment certification, and publication management.

Resource management
Efficient incident management requires a system for identifying available resources at all jurisdictional levels to enable timely and unimpeded access to resources needed to prepare for, respond to, or recover from an incident. Resource management under the NIMS includes mutual-aid agreements; the use of special Federal, State, local, and tribal teams; and resource mobilization protocols.

Communications and information management
NIMS requires incident management organizations to ensure that effective interoperable communications and information management processes, procedures and systems exist to support a wide variety of incident management activities across agencies and jurisdictions.