The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Managing Complex Incidents and Special Events | BTS33

Episode Date: July 28, 2019

Picking up from my last ICS episode in October 2018, I share tips to succeed in the ICS 400 course and apply the principles in the real world.Full write-up at https://kevtalkspod.com/bts-ep33-managing-complex-incidents-with-incident-command-system-ics-400/

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we'll get started with between the slides in 3, 2, 1. A catastrophic incident, as defined by the National Response Framework, is any natural or man-made incident, including terrorism, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and or government functions. A catastrophic incident could result in sustained nationwide impacts over a prolonged period of time, almost immediately exceeds resources normally available to state, tribal, local, and private sector authorities in the impacted area, and significantly interrupts governmental operations and emergency services to such an extent that national security could be threatened. That's the definition of catastrophic incidents from the manual for the Incident Command System 400, Advanced Incident Command System for Complex Incidents. Well, that's a lot. So,

I'll just say this. Welcome to Between the Slides, episode 33, the complexity of incident complexes with Incident Command 400. I'm your host, Kevin Pinnell. Thank you, everybody, for coming back. We're going to pick up with some of the kind of old school, as they say, Between the Slides 5, like we started this podcast with. And this time, we're going to go over the ICS 400 course. I'm going to start in actually section three. So I'm skipping to three because I have kind of caveats that aren't in the five, we'll say. And that's that by the time you hit the incident command system four course, you need to be up to speed and know what the positions do in the incident command system. That's the command and general staff. You need to be familiar with

the planning P process. And because that really is going to shape what you can or can't do. And as I'll touch on later, by the time you deploy folks and you have complexes and you're using some things called area command and branch tactical planning, you need people that are familiar with these, that have experience. You can have some trainees, but this isn't where you're going to send your folks to a nice, comfortable planned event. This is where you need your A-team and your A-game. And if you haven't taken those courses, if you're not familiar, fortunately, this podcast exists. And so if you jump back to episodes two, three, and four, I go over NIMS 702, Incident Command System 100, then 200, then 300 in Episodes 3, 4, and 5, actually.

And then in Episode 6, if you need some incident management, I talk about the O-305 class and how to prepare for that. So that's kind of a progression. The 305 class is kind of toward incident management team-ish, which this complex incidents will bring incident management teams in, but they can also be coordinated and taken care of by folks that are in a locality that just know the incident command system. So now that we're all prepared for this ICS 400 course, we've done all our classes, we know the terms. The first of the between the slides five, I would say, is that principles apply across all complexities, right? So if you know those principles, then you can apply them just using kind of different tools in the toolbox, as it were, which is really where you get into, you know, complex incidents. And so that's the first one is, you know, just remember that.

And if you get stuck when you're taking this class and you're trying to decide which complexity kind of thing do I use or you're in a real incident and you get stuck, just come back to the planning P, look at it, see where you are in the process, and just bring the team together, talk about things and go that way. And again, the kind of cheater, if you will, is that foundational four we've talked about. If you get stuck, come back to making sure

that you all have objectives or you're working towards them, that you are pulling together resources, that you have an organizational chart, whatever that looks like. And we'll get into some of those options here complex-wise. But even if it's a basic incident command system chart, and then make sure you're communicating. And that will bring you back to go, okay, now let's work through whatever other flavor of organization that you try and have.

So that's my first one. And so what are some of those principles with complexity is, you know, what makes a complex incident and, you know, it's number of people involved, right? Whether it's the staff supporting it or the public, is it geographically spread out all over the place? Are there tons of resources? Is it going to take days, weeks, years? You know, think about anything from, I've talked about the UCI bike race that was nine days operationally when we were doing that, but it was months beforehand. So that's pretty complex. Also geographically, it was spread all over the place. And think about the deep water horizon, that huge oil spill, right?

That took months and months and cleanup and years, you know, after that. So super complex incidents that way. They're high visibility usually, right? So a very complex incident. All those ones that I mentioned had pretty good visibility. And they can be traumatic, right? So there can be some mass casualties involved and incident complexity. And the example I'm going to use throughout this podcast is public health stuff, right? Because to me, one, those are complex because it's not a fire that you can see or a bad guy that you can take out or bleeding that you can stop directly.

It's let's say worst case and part of this is one because my roots are in public health but also I just started playing this video game called The Division where you're this kind of last line of defense to bring America back from this biological outbreak. Again you can't see it. Systems are breaking down. There's problems all over the place. And so we'll use that as an example with a public health outbreak. But, again, these same principles, I developed incident command and incident management principles through public health

and then working very closely regularly with public safety and other partners' utilities. So those principles apply across. So the first thing is just remember that. Keep it to basics and then work through the complexity stuff in this course as you get there. So don't get freaked out when you start hearing all these new terms. My second thing is, as you're thinking about these principles, the commonalities, the basics that you know, then the second thing is think about the complexity considerations. Start making a list in your mind.

Is it the local jurisdiction that's overwhelmed? Are we now up to the state that now has to coordinate multiple jurisdictions, whether it's localities, cities, towns, regions? Is it a federal deployment that's determined? That catastrophic event that I read in the beginning of this podcast, something that big, a public health emergency has been declared, or there's a big terrorist attack like unfortunately we've had in the past. So think about those kind of things.

And it's going to make a huge impact on the planning. So as a planning section chief, I'm having to coordinate any of these things we'll talk about later as we go along in the episode. If folks are spread out geographically, plus there's bodies everywhere, plus we have multiple teams, that as a plans chief trying to pull that together is going to be very hard to do. And that'll affect some of our decisions and for the incident commander and other folks on the team. Logistically, everybody needs the same supplies, especially in a public health incident, Tyvek suits, masks, gloves, disinfectant, all that kind of stuff. We saw a little bit of this in the Ebola scare a few years ago. Fortunately, it wasn't a rampaging virus on the scale of the 1918

flu that broke out, but that's the worst case scenario. That's what public health folks plan for. That's what I plan for, and that's what we always have to keep in our head. I've mentioned that in other episodes, is plan toward the worst scenario. Logistically, that's going to be just super complex because everybody's going to want stuff, and it's going to be hard to distribute people and supplies all over the place. Operationally, by default, there's going to be just super complex because everybody's going to want stuff and it's going to be hard to distribute people and supplies all over the place. Operationally, by default, there's going to be more people on the ground. There's going to be more area to cover. So that greatly affects this. And again, when we get into setting up these different incident complex organizations, you will look at some of these scenarios. So the first thing, again, stick to the basics,

understand your principles. The second thing is start thinking about what's making this complex, because then we can start breaking it down. So if it is locality driven, okay, how are we going to work with all these other folks across the region or the state or nationally and coordinate? How are we going to expand planning and operations and logistics? And just start your mind down that road. And now we'll get into how you can actually do some of that. So the summary of between the slides five, number three for this ICS 400 is divide and conquer. So just think about that concept and now we'll go into the different complexities and this

is really from the book and I'll say this is from April 2019, the revision of ICS 400. It's a great manual. This is a student manual I looked at and it's got excellent references for all the stuff we talked about already as far as the review of the command system stuff, the planning process and then great visuals for all the stuff we'll talk about now. So kudos to FEMA, NWCG, USDA, Coast Guard and the US Fire Administration. All logos that are on the front of the book. So really well put together training reference. So divide and conquer. So what does that mean? So let's go through

option one, as it were in the book, and this is in creating an incident complex. So what does that mean? We talked about a cash rock event, what makes a complex incident, we talked about geography, number of people, resources. So basically, what we're going to do is we're going to create our incident command system, we'll have an incident commander. We'll have our command staff, right? So the IC, the officer positions, ops planning logs and finance, except in operations, what we're going to do is now create branches. So how this differs from just having a regular ICS structure with branches in it is each of the branches is its own incident, but you still have the same planning, logistics, finance, admin, finance,

admin, ops chief, and incident commander. So instead of just having like geographic or functional branches, and that's why we use branches in any complexes because member branches can do either. So an example is, and I'll go to Parnellville as my friend Rob Raleigh from episode 28 mentions in some of his examples. So let's say we're in Parnellville, we're in the county of, and we're doing points of dispensing. So public health wise, that means I'm gonna try and give folks a certain number of medication within a certain timeframe.

So it could be a few hundred thousand within 48 hours and we're giving them a 10 day supply of pills, right? So that's a big deal. That's gonna be spread out. The way I would do that is in operations, I would have point of dispensing one or pod. So I'd have pod one branch, pod two branch, pod three branch. So we're going to use the same logistics section for each of those coordinating staffing and supplies to each of there. We're going to have one, the same kind of planning

section coordinating that. But again, from there, the branch can also break down divisions and groups and stuff. So those same principles, right? Because it goes section, branch, division, group, team task force, and then single resources. But that's a complex, right? So you start using branches, breaking that out more in operations. And the difference is each one of those branches is kind of its own incident, but it's not broken out to be a separate command and general staff, right? So that's what's going on here. So the good advantages of that is span of control, right? We still don't want to have a ton of people reporting to one person. We want to geographically be able to get a better handle on things. So if they're spread out,

we can have those different branches and we'll have branch directors reporting back up to the ops section chief. And that'll be pretty helpful for flow of information. So really nothing new as far as terminology or concepts we're using. It's just a matter of instead of just branches all in one incident, it's branches in separate incidents. So option two for incident complexes is to divide the incident geographically into whether it's jurisdictional or river or just going, hey, I'm going to slice it down the Middle East and West.

And the difference with this between just having divisions, you know, divisions of those geographic is that each of the sides of the incident will say, so East Parnellville and West Parnellville, each of them has their own command and general staff, right? So now we know, hey, we've got to split this because it's too much for one incident command structure to handle. So we're going to split it up and there's an east and west part of all commands with their own command and general staff. Certainly they'll coordinate together.

They'll probably be working with an emergency operations center or multi-agency coordination center or something like that. Or if they're just incidents of significant size that happen to be going on at the same time, they could kind of coordinate on their own. But if it's something that big, then that's kind of likely. So option two, we're going to divide it. We're going to have east and west. They're going to have their own kind of incident management teams, really, to them.

They're going to have command and general staff. So that's something. And, you know, factors with this is it's a geographic issue, or maybe we have one operation, one command, and Parnellville needs to focus completely on dispensing. And the other command in Parnellville needs to focus completely on the investigation. So our epidemiologists and stuff are going to be in there trying to figure out where did this virus come from or sickness or whatever's going on while we're trying to get medications to people at the same time. And those don't need to be under the same command because they're very different functions. The objectives are going to be a bit different.

The other thing is that we might divide it because one thing's happening in Rallytown and the other thing's happening in Parnellville, right? And they may be similar or different, but we're working together. So they say, you know what? These are two totally different jurisdictions. Let's just split them up. We stay in contact we'll communicate but they need to be split into you know dividing the incidents into their own so option three is called branch tactical planning and really what this means is we're still

going to have an overall process we're still going to have planning and operations working together to help coordinate you know operations making the plan planning supporting the process the difference is once we have that, even if we have work assignments from one big tactics meeting, we're going to say, okay, let's go to power branch or fire branch, EMS, whatever the branch is called. And now we're going to really do some tactics in there because we are, you know, let's say we're going to collect samples. So, you know, one branch is objective. Let's say we have sample collection branch. we have investigations branch, we have dispensing branch, right? It's very different. While operations have to keep going on and there's

one overall process, the process for going and getting a bunch of samples for whatever sickness is happening is different than it is to do concentric ring kind of investigations. And you may do those at the same time, but it's different certainly than operationalizing, getting a bunch of pills or injections or whatever we need to do to people in a big, huge operation. Another example, and this one's from the manual as well, and I worked some of this, of working with the coroner's office to do mobile morgue operations. So getting into it, how are we going to, if there's a huge outbreak and folks are unfortunately dying and we have to dispose of these infected bodies,

how do we get the little morgue trailers? How do we get big refrigeration trucks? How do we get where we can store and move these bodies so that the infection doesn't spread as much? Will we stop it or we isolate it? And so that's some considerations for that branch tactical planning because, again, how we operate a mobile morgue needs a little more detail. So we're going to kind of get in the weeds more at the branch level and help them figure it out. Another opportunity there is if we're going to get the investigations and intelligence stood up. And to me, this could also kind of be like I've used this before and my teammates and I as just another section. So we didn't really make it that way. But let's say we really need to get in. There's some law enforcement sensitive stuff. There's some intelligence things and

intelligence, including epidemiologists and things like that. As far as the disease, we need those experts. So we need to be covert to the point where we need to keep that kind of in the branch. And so that's what branch tactical planning is kind of option three can do for you so option four uh from the manual again and as far as complex incidents or incident complexes right is to add an operations section or added a logistics section so that means you'd have you know an incident commander overall then you'd have either a deputy IC in parentheses operations or deputy IC in parentheses logistics or both. And you'd have kind of like an east operations, west operations. And again, you know, this is determined.

It's not used a lot. And it says that in the manual. And I don't know if we've ever used this. And we've worked some pretty big incidents. Can your core command and general staff support the incident without having to add additional sections? Because something to think about is you need then qualified folks or folks experienced enough. I don't know if they have to necessarily really have the task book. I mean, that's optimal. Or someone that can handle their own whole new section that's going to work

with the other ops section, with the other planning and finance and admin logistics sections, because now we're adding more folks, more spain and control, more opportunities to miss communication, and of course, more to have good communication. So that's really the driving factor is if your core command and general staff say, no, we're good, we can support this, then you don't need to add the ops or log section. And this is just another thing kind of under the umbrella. I would really recommend trying to work out and optimize your tactics in your organization in the operations section. And so that way you can, you know, again, you can split out with as many branches up to seven, right, ideally, or divisions and groups, teams, you can really expand an operations section as one section

very smartly if you just use that span of control to your advantage. And again, you can kind of break the rules against the NIMS police with some of the more stable things like we talked about traffic posts having a 10 to 1 ratio and things like that. So again, you're also going to have deputy and senate commanders that are then also specialists in logistics or operations. So now you're giving folks or bringing folks in up to kind of a higher level. And that's another thing too. So that goes back to that, you know, you definitely want qualified or experienced in

credentials folks. So not used a whole lot. It's just one of the options that's in here. And option five, I actually don't agree with, but it talks about an incident, you know, complex as standing up the intel and investigations function. I think this could just be another section, or again, it could be embedded somewhere. But if it's so big, you certainly could, you would already have a complex incident in my mind. And so I would find where I would put the physicians or the epidemiologists that are the disease experts, wherever I needed them and kind of the standard incident command system structure, or maybe the area command, which we'll get into after this, or one of the other complex types.

But I don't agree that just standing up and telling investigations is kind of its own complex. I think it's just another tool in the toolbox that we could put anywhere. And public safety-wise, this could mean, you know, is there law enforcement sensitive stuff? Is federal law enforcement involved because it's a natural disaster and an attack or potential attack? And the intelligence community, DHS, folks like that. But there's easy ways to integrate them into a standard kind of incident command system. I look forward to hearing from other folks that are practitioners of incident management, incident command system, what you think about this. But per the book, this is listed as the fifth option.

So another great thing about the manual and the revised version, and it was similar in the original books for ICS 400, is there's a pretty long exercise for each of these. So you get a good amount of hands-on in how can I apply any of these five incident complex principles or structures as a team. So you'll be broken out in the class and so again in your head with number one you know remember those principles those basics then think about how can this spin up into something that's more complex what's making it complex and let that drive which direction you go with one of these five choices that you break out that can be kind of your you know decision tree if you will so. So, okay, we know

our principles. We know what we can do or should do with ICS. We can do really anything we want to. How can we work together and communicate as a team? What are those four things? What objectives do we have or are we working toward? What's our org chart look like? What resources do we or don't we have? How are we going to communicate? And use those to help kind of be your litmus test, as they will, and then go, okay, you know what, we should do branch tactical planning, or we should just make this a complex and add some branches within ops or something like that. So those to consider. Again, the manual has much more information, but that's a very quick summary from my standpoint. The next thing we're going to talk about is area command. So area command for this podcast, FYI, is BetweenTheSlides.com.

We are also available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, on the Instagram at PenelopeG. Send me an email at kp.bts.podcast at gmail.com. If you have a story, if you are an incident management practitioner, project manager, whatever, you want to share a good process, tell us about yourself and help other folks make progress. On the betweenthesides.com, we actually have a, be on the podcast link, send out, fill out some info, send it, and I'll get in touch with you, get your contact information to me. Also, don't forget, I just posted this the other day. We got some new templates from Rob Rowley. So some great situational awareness, how to, you know, what information we need to gather and those. So some great situational awareness, what information do we need to

gather and those. So check that out as well. So let's get back to area command. So what does this mean? It fortunately means a lot of what it sounds like. We're going to have an area commander that's looking at kind of, let's say an entire county or city or a unified area command. So let's say we have a regional thing going on and we have more than one jurisdiction. So we're going to have leadership of whoever the unified area commanders are in that aspect. So let's focus though back on one area commander in one locality or actually let's look at the unified area command. So what this means is there's one big unified command, right? That's an area command and it's looking at, let's say, all these different localities. So there's incident command, Parnell Parnellville pods points of dispensing

there's incident command rally town points of dispensing and then there's incident command Trev City point of dispensing right so this is the big huge we are giving out do we are dispensing stuff in this entire region because this is where let's say the anthrax exposure was so we need to get that 10-day supply of antibiotics to hundreds of thousands of people in 48 hours so how we're gonna break this up is by the jurisdictions right we're gonna be supporting those each each of those emergency operations centers for each of those localities will no doubt be open for something this big we'll

also have multi-agency coordination groups where we'll have other local and state and probably federal support working together. And we're going to have some pretty broad objectives, right? So dispense antibiotics to as many people as possible in whatever amount of time, or we can put some numbers in there. The numbers will vary depending on the locality, right? So it could really be, you know, dispense that 10 day supply of antibiotics to all the residents in Parnellville, in Raleigh Town, and in Trev City within 48 hours. So that's a very broad objective. Then we'll get into how we're actually going to do that in our tactics.

So for this unified area command, again, we're looking at three different jurisdictions, each with their own incident command structure, working issues on the ground, supported by emergency operation centers, providing support and coordination with communications and joint information and logistics and whatever else is needed, but not doing the tactical stuff, right? But we're all working together. A big thing, especially in public health issues, but another big terrorist or whatever is there's going to be some delegated authority, right? There's a lot of legal issues as far as anything from weapons in

the point of dispensing to flagging offenders of various types to just trying to get people in and out of there to screenings. And it's so complex and time consuming that you have to think about what's the objective. The objective would be to get the medications to people as quickly as possible. It's not right now to catch a bad guy. So that's a tough balance there. And that's all stuff that goes into the planning for these things every day. The other thing you need comes back to qualifications. When you get to this level of work, you need truly qualified people to be involved in this.

From the command level to down on the ground to the folks that are giving the shots or handing out the pills because this is high stress, high throughput, meaning we're trying to get as many people through as we can, high safety risks. Folks are going to be hyped up. They may or may not be as friendly to their neighbors as they usually are, but that's a lot of consideration. Again, that area command is one big command structure, but you're looking at literally other areas. You could also have an area command in one locality. So let's say you have an area command for one county, and then you have an east and

west incidents or areas, or rather incidents. So kind of similar to what we talked about with when you divide a single incident, except for this, it's under one umbrella. we're not breaking them apart as separate things so that covers the fourth thing which is to determine your areas of operations or ao for the area command so when you get into looking at how you're going to chop that up that's between the slides five four is determine what areas or what how you're going to do that is it a geographic thing that breaks it up is it localities we talked about for those dispensings the fifth thing I'll say is that you have to bring your A game both to this course at 400 and then when you're going to be applying those. And when I say that, again, you're going

to need to, hopefully you've got folks rostered up that have, you know, training records that you know that are your first line team, your A team, your B team, your C team, your 1, 2, 3, however you want to put those in there. But when you get ready to send folks to help support and manage complex incidents, you're at a whole nother level than folks even that have maybe done some 300 and they're going to do that one planned event once a year. If you're dispensing to entire localities, if you're responding to multiple hazardous materials incidents or active shooter attacks that are coordinated or multiple bombings at the same time something like that you're gonna have your day-to-day folks that are out there on the street doing their job every day they know what they're doing they know how to stop the bad guy they knew how to work together

and that active shooter response but how does everybody know how to manage the media for the entire locality I, imagine the Boston bombing and the media and the crowdsourcing and just all that kind of stuff. So make sure that you have pre-rostered who your go-to folks are, whether that's through the Emergency Operations Center or your incident management team, however you do it. But you've got to have people trained up and ready to go. So as a quick rundown again of these between the slides five, and again, thanks for everybody that's stayed through here. Here's the summary. So you can tell folks to jump to like 26 minutes. So five things I think are critical, both for this course and then actually applying these principles for 400 is remember that the principles are the same, right? From NIM 700 and ICS 100 through this 400 level. So come back to basics if you get kind of riled up or stuck. The second thing is consider

what is making the incident complex, right? Is it that we have a lot of planning to do or there's a lot of operations that spread out, there's a lot of resources and then help that drive which direction you go with these incident complex applications. Third thing is divide and conquer and that's when you're going to decide, okay, we going to apply are we going to have a complex with branches are we going to divide into separate incidents are we going to do branch tactical planning are we going to add ops or log sections or are we going to stand up that intel and investigations function so just start thinking about that list that pick list you could you could make a cheat sheet for this as well or have the references from the class and be pretty helpful the fourth thing if

you're gonna go area of operations or area command rather determine what are your area of operations is it separate jurisdictions is it just different parts of one jurisdiction is it north and south of the river and let that be the driver so break it down to its simplest kind of thing and the fifth thing kind of a recurring theme and is bring your A game and your A team, right? This is the time when you're, if you're in the class, take your A game to that class, just like you should every class. Be involved, don't fight the scenarios, and really try and apply all the stuff you've learned and done so far in the Incident Command System training that

you've completed. And then if you're sent out in the field and you're thinking, man, maybe we need to make this a complex, now start applying what you're going to learn in this class. So thank you all very much. That's the Between the Slides 5 for the complexity of incident complexes with Incident Command System 400. I hope you all enjoy this class. It's a multi-day class. It's in-person only, as it should be, because you're going to get some great hands-on. The new manual from 2019 is very good.

So, again, kudos to those federal organizations that put that together, and I'm sure they had input from local and state folks that make this stuff happen every day. Again, I mentioned where I'm available. If all else fails, go to BetweenTheSlides.com. We've got links to everything else. We've got episodes, resources, et cetera. Thank you all for all you do out there each and every day, whether you're in the office, on the street, managing big incidents like this, or getting after it in the gym and jujitsu. Godspeed.