With all the fire response activity this week- I thought I’d do a piece on the framework that we’re all using for our response activities. We use the National Incident Management System (NIMS) to guide and organize all of our responses because it provides a systematic, proactive structure with which to organize response activities. Many of you have taken the NIMS courses- but I’m pretty sure many of you haven’t. The introductory course is called IS-700. This course is provides an introduction to NIMS components, concepts and principles. It’s a very good overview course for political and government leaders, agency and organization administrators and department heads. There are also a series of new, more specialized, follow-up courses including the basic IS-100.b which introduces Incident Command; IS-100.HCb Incident Command for Healthcare Facilities; IS-100.HE for Higher Education; and IS-100.SCa for Schools. All these courses are on-line and free- and are a very good telework activity.
