Incident Command System

The Incident Command System (ICS) is a standardized approach to the command, control, and coordination of emergency response providing a common hierarchy within which responders from multiple agencies can be effective.

ICS was initially developed to address problems of inter-agency responses to wildfires in California and Arizona but is now a component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) in the US, where it has evolved into use in All-Hazards situations, ranging from active shootings to HazMat scenes. In addition, ICS has acted as a pattern for similar approaches internationally.

ICS consists of a standard management hierarchy and procedures for managing temporary incident(s) of any size. ICS procedures should be pre-established and sanctioned by participating authorities, and personnel should be well-trained prior to an incident.

ICS includes procedures to select and form temporary management hierarchies to control funds, personnel, facilities, equipment, and communications. Personnel are assigned according to established standards and procedures previously sanctioned by participating authorities. ICS is a system designed to be used or applied from the time an incident occurs until the requirement for management and operations no longer exist.

ICS is interdisciplinary and organizationally flexible to meet the following management challenges:

The ICS concept was formed in 1968 at a meeting of Fire Chiefs in Phoenix, Arizona. The program was built primarily to take after the management hierarchy of the US Navy and it was mainly for fire fighting of wildfires in California and Arizona. During the 1970s, ICS was fully developed during massive wildfire suppression efforts in California and following a series of catastrophic wildfires in California's urban interface. Property damage ran into the millions, and many people died or were injured. Studies determined that response problems often related to communication and management deficiencies rather than lack of resources or failure of tactics.

Weaknesses in incident management were often due to:

Emergency Managers determined that the existing management structures — frequently unique to each agency — did not scale to dealing with massive mutual aid responses involving dozens of distinct agencies and when these various agencies worked together their specific training and procedures clashed. As a result, a new command and control paradigm was collaboratively developed to provide a consistent, integrated framework for the management of all incidents from small incidents to large, multi-agency emergencies.

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