pyroknight Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 Okay, I support the premise of NIMS, I really do. I spent a week PLUS of my life getting the training necessary to be an ICS-300 and 400 trainer. Some of the information is good information (some of it is federal CRAP, but there's good stuff in there if you sift through it). I knew that resource typing was going to be difficult. Trying to get firefighters and police officers across the country to agree on what constitutes a Level 1 Firefighter, or a Level 2 Law Enforcement Officer, or, heaven forbid, a Tactical Law Enforcement Officer, is going to be a long, arduous process. So, if you're the contractor or federal employee faced with this particular headache, what do you do? Why you come up with typing for a bunch of easy, but completely useless bunk, of course! They had already done the typing for animal rescue, now they have created the "PATHFINDER TASK FORCE". There's no controversy surrounding them because they don't exist! They were created as they were typed. Yeesh! http://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/nims/path_1507.pdf I am likely the only ICS geek who even cares about this stuff, but I feel better for having vented. We now return you to your regularly scheduled EMS rants already in progress.
dahlio Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 ICS to me is a requirement that I will hopefully never use. It's so loose in our system, and we only need to take the online courses. Did people really think that we're not going to just get the answers from our buddy? It's crazy to think that everyone is going to know ICS, just because of an online course. If I were running it, I would require a real situation training scenario, and make a team to work it out. You don't learn it until it's applied, and that's where the system fails.
AZCEP Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 The best thing about the ICS system was scalability. You could make it work for any size incident. The move to NIMS was intended to have everyone on the same page, and it is a good thought, but it is poorly executed. Each type of provider will interpret the information differently, and will have a hard time integrating into the system when it is being used.
JakeEMTP Posted May 15, 2007 Posted May 15, 2007 The best thing about the ICS system was scalability. You could make it work for any size incident. The move to NIMS was intended to have everyone on the same page, and it is a good thought, but it is poorly executed. Each type of provider will interpret the information differently, and will have a hard time integrating into the system when it is being used. This is so true. We just recently had a mock plane crash disaster. " What we got here is, failure to communicate. Some men, you just can't reach". The county squads couldn't communicate with command which was the city's fire dept. which uses a different frequency band than everyone else because they are, to put it mildly, special. Don't belive me? Just ask them. Also, Command failed to designate and therefore the whole thing became a clusterfuck. The premise of NIMS is excellent. Disasters like our drill will hopefully improve our little corner of the universe once the higher-ups come up with a better way to talk to each other. We hope and pray we don't have a real disaster between now and then. :roll:
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