My goal is simple: I hope that every single fire service agency will implement and use some form of an incident management system. If you have the opportunity to move around the country, I bet you will hear the same objections I do. While I empathize with the departments with fewer personnel or less funding than my own and others, I value the life and safety of every firefighter over any building or property in any community. Some folks just won't allow reason and shared knowledge to alter their positions. Nobody should ever force or allow you to undertake an unsafe operation.

“We don't have enough people to do this IMS stuff,” some might say. Bull! That's the most-used excuse I hear from my well-intentioned friends. They are correct, there aren't enough people in any agency today. Fire service staffing is the number-one challenge of both the career and volunteer fire departments.

Career departments in cash-strapped cities are dying on the vine, withering from years of political neglect and poor department infrastructure decisions. Now some of these cities are faced with deciding whether to budget for firefighters or replace aging fleets of worn-out apparatus. One without the other dooms the goal of a well-protected community.

The volunteer fire service isn't doing any better. Trends show fewer volunteers being recruited and retained, and with fewer people with less time, volunteer departments are lengthening response times, relying more on mutual aid and being forced to hire career people or consolidate or merge with other agencies to continue providing service.

In this post — Sept. 11 era, I envisioned that the sacrifices of the 343 murdered FDNY firefighters would finally propel our national and local political leaders to adequately fund and staff our fire departments. It hasn't happened, nor will it in the near future. Today, even FDNY is facing a huge budget crisis.

It doesn't matter how many people you have, if you go out the door, someone has to be the incident commander. Whether you run with three people or 30 people, the point is the same. You need a boss, a decision-maker, an IC. When a well-intentioned fire officer tells me that his or her department can't implement an incident command system for all but the largest of multiple alarm fires, I cringe in shock. Surely they have not read the reports on firefighter fatalities and serious injuries. We're not losing our people hours into major events. We lose them based on decisions made — or not made — in the first few minutes of our alarms. Seemingly small routine fires may grow into major events, and often small events don't appear to be life threatening. Complacency kills.

Every player has a role on the fire scene; the IC's is just a bit more involved. If you arrived on an engine company, your tasks are pretty straightforward. Engine crews are responsible for water supply and attack lines. Show up on a ladder vehicle and you've got a few more tasks, but they revolve around techniques of search and entry, rescue, ventilation, salvage, and overhaul. Preplanning and training make the roles of the task-level participants obvious and second nature.

But too often our departments' training is focused on these task-level operations, and we don't plan and train for the overall mission. I liken our standard training to a musician who masters his or her instrument but never practices with the orchestra. You know how well a virtuoso would perform without the chance to practice with the rest of the players. The orchestra conductor needs to get all of the players together and train as a group. So where does an IC fit in?

The IC's task is to make good decisions — nothing more, nothing less. This is the reason you're on the scene. When you take away all of the other roles and responsibilities of a chief officer, the cornerstone of the position is to lead the people and manage the emergency operations. This is not meant to minimize or trivialize the importance of your daily function within your organization. The battalion mail still needs to be delivered, the work chart needs to be filled, and personal and personnel issues always demand attention. But once in your career, once in your lifetime, once a month, week or shift and maybe more often, you will be at an emergency situation and everyone operating at that scene will depend on you to make the proper decisions to handle the event.

Every system needs to recognize and support the role of one person to oversee and evaluate the event. When I listen to well-intentioned people explain why an incident management system won't work in their department, my mind wanders to all of the reports on fatalities and near misses, those accidents that almost killed or injured firefighters. I hear the voices of those from the affected department saying the same things after their incidents.

Don't let this negative thought affect what we now know from the deaths and injuries of thousands of firefighters. Every single emergency incident demands the attention of one person whose sole assignment is to monitor and oversee the overall success and viability of the event.

If you can't support one person to monitor the overall activity, maybe you shouldn't be inside any burning structures. Harsh words, I know. The thought of crews operating inside an environment immediately dangerous to life and health, without a person in a fixed position monitoring and evaluating the progress and safety of the operation is unthinkable in this era. Right now, as you read this, it's happening that way somewhere.

Plan and practice for those low frequency events that have the potential of high impact on your department, especially those in which you have no discretionary time to ponder your decisions. As my friend Gordon Graham has drilled into my head, predictable is preventable. With absolute certainty I can predict that any fire department which does not support a dedicated IC to monitor and evaluate their emergency operations will have a greater chance of serious injury and firefighter death.

One person can make it happen. All it takes is one person on the scene, and you can be the one person to make that difference.

Glenn D. Usdin is chief of the Lancaster Township (Pa.) Fire Department and the founder of Command School Inc., which is co-sponsored by the International Association of Fire Chiefs and Fire Chief. Usdin is also the founder and former president of Northeast Fire Apparatus.