New Capabilities for Incident Command System
The National Interagency Incident Management System (NIIMS), based on ICS, is a systematic process for the command, control, and coordination of emergency response used by all levels of government and by many organisations in the private sector. It is a process by which personnel, policies, procedures, facilities, and equipment are integrated into a common organisational structure designed to manage emergencies or disasters of all types, including fires, floods, hurricanes and oil spills. All emergency response organisations are trained in this standardised approach.
Originally developed to respond to forest fires in California in the 1970's, the ICS planning protocol is focused on short term goals and results. The size and scope of the Macondo Well incident, the largest oil spill in US history, made the standard ICS planning process inadequate for long-range forecasting.
Leveraging its deep expertise in customising and implementing process improvement methods, NOVACES integrated the ICS planning protocols with project management procedures to extend the ICS planning cycle and allow Incident Command to forecast resource needs and costs up to completion of the response. NOVACES coached the ICS organisation on this approach to emergency response and gained the trust of all levels of the response organisation.
To date, NOVACES has planned and forecast over 100,000 tasks for the oil spill response. At peak, the response involved over 45,000 personnel across four states and 4,000 miles of affected coastline.
