Last March, the Department of Homeland Security announced the completion of the National Incident Management System, a comprehensive incident response system and unified chain of command. DHS Secretary Tom Ridge appointed Gil Jamieson as acting director of the NIMS Integration Center in October. As the NIC's director, Jamieson oversees NIMS implementation and the maintenance and the development of NIMS-related standards, guidelines, and support to all incident management and responder organizations. For the purposes of federal grants, the NIC validates compliance with the NIMS and the National Response Plan standards.

Jamieson has held national-level positions with FEMA since 1979, where he managed disaster assistance programs, served the FEMA director on program analysis and implemented the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 as director of planning. After Sept. 11, Jamieson directed the Program Coordination Division in FEMA's Office of National Preparedness.

Bringing so many sectors involved in emergency response together under NIMS has to be a phenomenal task. How is it going?

It's going extraordinarily well. What we have going for us in terms of the monumental task ahead is a genuine understanding and appreciation that the nation really needs the NIMS to improve the way that we prepare for and respond to disasters. So unlike some other federal initiatives, where we're asking state and local governments to take on a task which may be outside their normal lines of business — or [something] they view as strictly a federal mandate — NIMS enjoys a relationship with first responders at the local and state levels where they really understand what we're trying to accomplish.

What's the most important thing that we share now with fire service officials about NIMS implementation?

For the first time, all of the funding that is flowing out to the state and local governments is going to be conditioned on their complying with the NIMS beginning in fiscal year 2007. That's an important date and point, particularly for the fire service, because Chief [Michael] Freeman [of Los Angeles, who testified before Congress last fall for the Terrorism and Homeland Security Committee of the International Association of Fire Chiefs,] is concerned that … maybe we were moving at this a bit too quickly. In our rollout, perhaps we were not clear enough about when we would expect to get compliance.

When you say that compliance is expected, are we shooting for full compliance or compliance with certain provisions?

We have reduced the number of what we think are the significant compliance requirements to 75, and even within those 75 are a combination of federal, state and local requirements. So the point I would really like to emphasize is that, as opposed to looking at the NIMS as a series of 75 particular tasks or items that need to be accomplished, what we're really trying to do is change the culture in terms of the way we do business. And the fire service has led the way in terms of the NIMS and use of the Incident Command System.… True compliance will really be based on the effectiveness with which we are able to do operations, and we're able to blend all those first responders' disciplines into an effective working team to attack a common problem. It shouldn't be looked at as 75 things we need to do; it should be looked at as using a system that is going to help us do our jobs better.

Are most fire service executives starting to think about how it will fit in their departments' operations and command systems?

I think the fire service is in a unique position and is leading the way toward national NIMS implementation. I would like to recognize the fact that we have fire service executives taking a broad spectrum of agencies and individuals [into NIMS] — from the major metropolitan fire chiefs with career firefighters to mid-size departments where we have a combination of both career and volunteer firefighters, to smaller departments that play a very important role in their own communities. We have to assume that there are some who may not have read and digested the NIMS doctrine from cover to cover, but the fire service by and large has embraced ICS and NIMS for quite some time. It's at the backbone of their operation and command strategies, so we very much see them as, quite frankly, the center of gravity in terms of the national implementation effort.

Read the full transcript of our interview with Jamieson, in which he addresses training and certification, FY 2005 compliance requirements and many other NIMS issues.