2/14/18 NIMO Teaches Command and General Staff for Local Incident Management Teams

Student participants work through
exercises and simulations
to increase their capability and capacity
to respond to wildland fire
and all hazard incidents as a
Type 3 Incident Management Team.

NIMO was asked to teach a Command and General Staff for Local IMTs class in Hawaii in January of 2018.

Cadre members from NIMO traveled to Hilo to put on the class. NIMO has been involved in teaching this and other classes in Hawaii, part of the Pacific Southwest Region (Region 5), for years. Participants were from the Hawaii Fire Department, Hawaii Division of Forestry and Wildlife, and the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.   

Students practiced the week-long learning via classroom
exercises, followed by a two-day all-hazard mudslide simulation.

Students at work during
the simulation. 

The  objectives for the class were:

• Provide student teams an opportunity to demonstrate understanding of the principles of Incident Command System (ICS) to manage a real-world incident.
• Demonstrate team work and individual competency in their functional areas to gather situational awareness, conduct strategic and risk assessments to develop a common operating picture, and develop an Incident Action Plan (IAP).
• Establish incident objectives and develop a course of action (IAP) that would achieve those objectives. 
• Take actions as a team and within each functional area to prepare for transfer of command and develop products expected from each team member.
• Practice conducting a strategy meeting as well as an operational period briefing

Students learned the primary roles and responsibilities
of the members of the Command and General Staff,
& learned about the ICS planning process aka the “Planning P”

NIMO Incident Commander Joe Reinarz says the group involved had a wide range of experience with ICS.  "Some of the students had no experience while some were already on teams on the Mainland. Because of that breadth of experience, we hope we helped to bring those with less experience, up to speed quicker and opened the door to all the agencies in their area working together. " 

According to the cadre, classroom instruction covered the standard topics and subjects:

• Functional Position Overview
• ICS Overview – Scaling from Type 5 to Type 4 to Type 3 incident
• Team Dynamics
• Characteristics of Mission Critical / High Performing Teams
• Team Building Exercises
• ICS Planning Process and Practice and Exercises
• Building a Common Operating Picture
• Command & General Staff Functional Presentations
  
• Applying ICS Principles to Other Types of Incidents
• In-Brief for Simulation for a two day simulation exercise

Reinarz says everyone in the class was engaged and ready for what comes next. "The next steps will be for them to use this experience to enable them to better use ICS to handle any events or projects that they will be working on in the future.  We also challenged them to continue to get more engaged in interagency cooperation for incidents and events." All students left the class with an ICS 300 certificate