The Department of Homeland Security marked a major milestone June 3 as it officially stood up the National Incident Management System Integration Center.

The department-wide, multi-agency organization is tasked with providing mechanisms for implementing the National Incident Management System across federal, state and local organizations. It will also be the nexus for routine maintenance and refinement of the system in the future.

Marko Bourne, deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Preparedness Division, is the NIC acting director, reporting directly to the DHS undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response. The NIC is housed at the FEMA's offices in Washington, D.C.

With the initial staff in place, Bourne said, the center is beginning work on how to implement the responsibilities assigned to it under NIMS, including the development of first responder training and certification standards, oversight of a national credentialing system, overseeing research and development efforts in incident management technologies and techniques, and developing mechanisms for ensuring compliance with NIMS.

NIMS compliance will be a condition for all federal preparedness grants starting in FY 2005. Bourne said one of the first tasks of the NIC will be to spell out what exactly NIMS compliance will entail:

“Certainly, we don't expect everyone to be 100% compliant with every tenet of the NIMS by October or even by the end of the next fiscal year. It's going to be an evolutionary, staged process, but how we're going to stage that out, we're going to be working on in the next month by bringing in folks from the state and local level to review some ideas and provide their input and feedback on it.”

To that end, the NIC home page was posted online under FEMA's Preparedness Division at www.fema.gov/preparedness/nims/index.shtm. A NIMS Basic Awareness Course was posted online to help emergency officials understand the NIMS. Frequently Asked Questions and a National Incident Management Capability Assurance Tool were expected to go up by the end of June. The capability assurance tool will help officials to assess their position with regard to the NIMS by going through a checklist.

“I think this is going to help folks realize two things,” said Bourne. “They're already a long way there, that NIMS is not some completely new animal that's just fallen off the federal wagon. They've been using it for 30 years and we've just refined it, added more to it and tried to bridge a lot of gaps that existed with some emergency response communities.”