NIMS in the Real World

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Comment by Mark J. Cotter on March 25, 2009 at 12:21am

Sorry to crash the NIMS support group, but I'm not a fan. I wrote a piece on the topic last year that can be found on the Fire Engineering web site: http://www.fireengineering.com/display_article/313283/25/none/none/BRNIS/Incident-Command-the-Washington-Way?
If you can't access it, e-mail me and I'll send you the text. In a nutshell, my position is that NIMS is "the emperor's new ICS" - lots of hype, support, and potential, but no substance. The argument that we should use this monstrosity daily in order to be fluent with it in the once-in-a-lifetime (for most of us) disaster is, to me, ludicrous. Instead, we need a system that works for the types of incidents that we typically face, and an army of government bureaucrats trained in NIMS so that it can actually be implemented when needed. I'm all about having standard terms and language so that we can understand each other, and interoperability would be a great thing, but NIMS is, in my opinion, a plan without a clue. If I'm wrong, and I fear that my failure to jump on the NIMS bandwagon is due to a failure to grasp some key concept that others can see clearly, please let me know.