One of the most important responsibilities of the incident commander and every member of the incident management structure is the safety of those operating under their supervision.

The reality is all emergencies resolve themselves at some point -- with or without human intervention. The purpose of incident management is to minimize the progression and impact of the crisis itself while maintaining a level of safety that allows responders to intervene in the pursuit of saving lives without loosing their own.

The National Incident Management System expands the scope of incident management to include prevention, preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. The NIMS suggests that management of an incident begins well before the response occurs and continues after the major response activities may have concluded.

Prevention: The IC who is truly dedicated to incident safety must realize that safety starts with efforts to prevent the incident. One of the more important preventative measures includes ensuring that those who will respond are adequately trained and equipped prior to the incident. No one should be placed in a role in the NIMS for which they haven’t been trained. Training must be spread across the breadth and depth of responding agencies to ensure that the IC has a number of possible options in terms of assigning IMS positions.

Preparedness: When command has identified the kinds of potential risks and found compatible resources and strategies to address these risks, preparedness is achieved. This includes adequate response capability along with standardized tactical evolutions, which are rigid enough to minimize the risks to crews but flexible enough to be applied to dynamic incident conditions.

Response: This is generally the aspect of IMS that receives the most attention. However, when the visible signs of the incident are not evident, command personnel can lose their focus on safe practices. The use of personal protective clothing must be standard and based on potential risks, visible or not. The command structure needs to match the incident rather than lag behind. A lag in command structure requires responders to work harder to overcome risks that the command structure has failed to identify. It also increases the possibility of overexertion on the part of otherwise dedicated responders.

Recovery: This is both a macro and a micro issue. Often, the macro concern of getting units “back in service” can become too important to on-scene command. Actually demobilization is a planning section function, which should be handled by plans in the form of a demobilization document within the context of the incident action plan. On occasion, lack of a planned demobilization creates potential safety hazards for weary responders who become so focused on getting back to their point of departure that they injure themselves on the way.

On the micro level, recovery is actually connected to the logistics section and its ability to rehabilitate the individual responders and their equipment and return them to operations.

Mitigation: This is probably the most difficult aspect of incident management in that many of the incidents that we respond to are very difficult to “make less harsh, severe or violent.” The challenge is that we have to often deal with three very powerful forces: The results of human behavior, the wrath of Mother Nature and the effects of Father Time. The line between mitigation and prevention can be difficult to distinguish. Where prevention focuses on stopping the event from occurring, mitigation assumes that the something has already happened and you don’t want it to happen again. Much in the way that flood prone areas attempt to mitigate future flood damage by changes in land use, incident commanders can mitigate the loss of crew inside the hazard zone by the effective use of divisions, groups or sectors. This may require the dispatching additional chief officers, or training company officers to serve a greater role in the command structure.

Command policies, training and implementation must be structured in a fashion that embraces and adapts to all phases of incident management, because the safety of responders is at risk in every phase.