The GENERAL STAFF of incident management personnel consists of the Incident Commander, Operations Chief, Planning Chief, Logistics Chief and Finance Chief.
A COMMAND STAFF of the Information Officer, Safety Officer and the Liaison Officer assists the Incident Commander.
The Information Officer develops information regarding incident cause, size, current situation, resources committed and other matters of general interest. The IO (or PIO) is the point of contact with the Media directly from the incident.
The Liaison Officer is responsible for interacting with representatives from assisting and cooperating agencies.
The Safety Officer assesses hazardous and unsafe situations and develops measures for assuring personnel safety. This Officer should have emergency authority to stop and or/prevent unsafe acts.
The Planning Section collects, evaluates and disseminates tactical information about the incident. It maintains information on the current and forecast situation, and on the status of resources assigned to the incident. As we have already seen, it is responsible for preparation and documentation of the Incident Action Plans.
Meanwhile, at the fire, the all out assault at the marshy area outside of the city stopped the raging fire. The units have been demobilized and are returning to their home bases, tired but successful in yet another cooperative incident response with the Incident Command System.
For communications responders, here's how ICS would function: PRIOR TO DISPATCH, government agency registered responders are be put in touch with the appropriate designee IN THEIR ORGANIZATION to get their final information for getting to the response (such as route, clothing, equipment requirements, duration of shift, person to report to, etc.
Communications responders would report to a RECEIVING position and then will be sent to the staging area to await actual field assignment. (EOC activities, being in the same physical location, would be different.) Actual assignment would come from the Operations Officer. The Operations Officer requests what is needed, the Logistics Officer obtains that resource and then makes it available to Operations where it is assigned as needed, all of which gives positive control and accountability, deploying only those requested and authorized to respond to the incident.
(Series end).
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