Last year, Deputy U.S. Fire Administrator Charlie Dickinson was overseeing a USFA project to develop a national fire service credentialing system to improve multi-agency coordination and effectiveness at federally declared disasters.

Headed by National Fire Academy Superintendent Denis Onieal, a working group of fire service leaders submitted recommendations for developing a credentialing system to the USFA in December. Credentialing is a requirement under Homeland Security Presidential Decision 5 for response to national disasters.

Dickinson, a 38-year fire service veteran and former Pittsburgh fire chief, is responsible for the daily operations of the U.S. Fire Administration's Emmitsburg (Md.) facility, including the NFA and the Emergency Management Institute.

Why is a national system of fire service credentialing needed?

The need for credentialing has grown out of each national disaster of the last 10 years. To be very candid, if you talk to those who have managed these incidents, they all say one of the most frustrating things they've had to deal with is the large number of firefighters who self-dispatch to the scene. It wasn't that these were bad people; the issue is that at the worst of times, when agencies have to work so hard to overcome the incident and manage the incident, they don't need distractions or extras, if you will.

To assess how useful these resources can be, we need a national system to identify individuals in the fire service so that we know that they have been requested to respond, what qualifications they have for working on the scene of a national disaster, how they are accounted for and who is supervising.

When a local incident becomes a federally declared disaster, the federal government then becomes responsible for payment, procurement and support. The USFA and the federal government believe this will be the most effective way to ensure that support will be credentialed.

Now that the credentialing working group has completed its report, what's next?

Right now, we have just an overview of what fire service credentialing means and the working group's ideas and recommendations for implementation. After [U.S. Fire Administrator] Dave Paulison has had a chance to review it, it will be passed around to the USFA staff. Then we'll share the plan through our newsletter and our Web page and gather input from the fire service. Major fire service organizations will certainly have opinions about this. This rough draft is basically an agreement by the major fire service organizations that we need to credential firefighters, how that may look and where we need to go.

What are some of the recommendations?

First of all, it will still be the fire chief's call whether he or she wants to credential anyone. The local level will decide if the department will participate in the credentialing process.

The credentialing system will be separate from the local mutual aid system. Local mutual aid interagency agreements — between jurisdictions, county, state, intrastate — should all stand as written and agreed upon. All credentialing simply means is if Charlie Dickinson shows up at a federally declared disaster and he's not part of the mutual aid system, we will have a means to identify whether he was summoned, who he is and what credentials he has, if any.

Another important thing to remember is this is not certification. We don't think the federal government should be telling local fire departments what they should certify their people in. But this system will identify what certifications you have, based on the NFPA's professional qualification standards. That's the baseline the group has recommended.

What will fire chiefs need to do to get personnel credentialed?

That's one piece of the puzzle we're still not crystal clear on. A significant number of fire departments already have ID cards, so one idea is that a prototype card be developed that every fire department could look at and then adapt its ID card to. Another was that the USFA be the card issuer. But I just don't think we could do that, simply because of the large volume of change in the fire departments around the country on a daily basis. It would be extremely difficult for any one agency to do that. The important thing is what is behind the credential.

What is the timeline for implementation?

It will be a while before credentialing will be fully implemented throughout the nation, there's no doubt about that. But with where our country is now, there is a sense of urgency. This will be an added value for the fire service. It's not absolutely critical that we do it tomorrow or next month, but it will be the next step in the evolution of our fire service.