Emergency Management 101

This chapter provides a background on the overall Emergency Management concepts referenced in the book. It is based primarily on the U.S. National Incident Management System (NIMS),¹ the National Preparedness Goal,² the National Disaster Response Framework,³ the National Disaster Recovery Framework,⁴ and other U.S. Federal policies, procedures, guidelines, and protocols. It includes a baseline set of definitions and alignments this book will make to these and other standards. Many of the common Emergency Management acronyms used liberally in this book are first introduced in this chapter. For example, reading Emergency Support Function abbreviated as ESF is much easier to understand (and to write out multiple times, there are 15 of them), once it is written and read a few times. Also in the United States, there are other organizations and groups which use different incident command systems (ICS) than the NIMS/ICS. For example, many hospitals’ use the Healthcare Incident Command System (HICS),⁵ or California uses its Standardized Emergency Management System (SEMS), which was the foundation for national implementation of NIMS/ICS.⁶

This chapter will also incorporate some international aspects, which may not be known to U.S.-based emergency managers, as well as some newer concepts being introduced to Emergency Management for socialization (operationalize, exercise, revise, and maintain). Hopefully, readers from other countries will be able to see their own national-level Emergency Management systems as able to be aligned to this construct in the United States. For example, in Australia, the Queensland state government has a full cycle of preparedness, response, and recovery support for flood assistance and recovery, including community recovery hub locations, emergency hardship assistance, and a Resilient Homes Fund.⁷ The terms are slightly different from what is available in the United States, but the concepts are the same or similar.