Natural Hazards Observer
| January 2006 | Volume XXX | Number 3 |
Focus on Hurricane Katrina
The Use of Incident Command
during Hurricane Katrina
Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the federal government mandated that all federal, state, and local governments adopt the Incident Command System (ICS) for disaster response. Today’s Incident Command System stems primarily from two versions developed in the early 1970s, the Incident Command System, developed in California by the FIRESCOPE program for the purposes of fighting forest fires, and the Fire Ground Command System, developed by the Phoenix, Arizona, Fire Department to better manage structure fires. The ICS has five major functions: command, operations, planning, logistics, and finance and administration. Through the years, firefighters have promoted this systematic and standardized approach as the best way to manage a wide variety of fires as well as other types of disasters. Nevertheless, little if any objective evidence exists to support the effectiveness of the ICS during disaster response. Thus, it seems only logical that if the ICS now drives our disaster response system, we must assess what works and what does not.
The initial focus of this quick response research was the ICS and communication issues in response to Hurricane Katrina at the federal, state, and local levels. However, the scope of the impact, extreme social disruption, and massive destruction wrought by Katrina forced us to narrow our research objective. Ultimately, we chose to examine the use of the ICS by federal agencies within the structure of the National Response Plan (NRP) in Louisiana. Since the federal response was coordinated by the Emergency Support Functions (ESFs), we looked specifically at how the ESFs applied the ICS. The Joint Field Office (JFO) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, housed 15 ESFs, each staffed with at least 20-25 individuals. We focused on four of these ESFs for this study and found a wide variation of ICS use. In order to protect the confidentiality of our respondents, we will not identify these ESFs in our discussion.
Observations
Of the four ESFs we studied:
- ESF-A did not use the ICS at all;
- ESF-B did not initially use the ICS, but a couple of weeks into the event it loosely adapted its terminology;
- ESF-C generally used the overall structure and approach of the ICS; and
- ESF-D took a “by the book approach.”
Thus, despite the heavy promotion and training mandates at the federal level to use the ICS during disaster, we found that different federal ESFs took different management approaches to handle their slice of the disaster response.
ESF-A is a long established part of the federal government that has been involved in disaster issues for decades. In their view, the organization successfully manages day-to-day events and disasters using their own management model. During the response to Katrina, they determined that their own model would work as well if not better than the ICS, and as a result did not use the ICS. Nevertheless, members of ESF-A still had extensive ICS training as required by the federal government.
ESF-B initially did not use the ICS. However, a couple weeks into the event, the managers of ESF-B decided to implement ICS terms (e.g., incident commander, finance, logistics, operations, planning) to at least give the appearance that they were using the federally mandated response system. Still, it seemed the ESF-B members in the trenches continued working as they had in previous disasters. Some knew the ICS but chose not to use it, some thought it was a bit of a joke, and others were oblivious to its purpose and nomenclature. Upper management and others within ESF-B had extensive experience managing disasters and drew upon their experiences and established ways of doing business, rather than upon the ICS, to accomplish their primary tasks.
Both ESF-C and ESF-D used the ICS. Although ESF-C used it generally, it was ESF-D’s strict approach that we found particularly interesting. Team leaders ensured that communications and paperwork flowed through the system appropriately. This was emphasized when it came to requesting resources and issuing purchase orders. To facilitate ICS use, signs were hung indicating where the different functions were being conducted. Not only did ESF-D employ the ICS in general, but they applied its structure to each of the individual functions. For example, within logistics the team had an incident commander along with a finance, logistics, operations, and planning person.
Our interviews revealed additional interesting information about the use of the ICS at the federal level. First, respondents from ESFs A, B, and D commented that the ICS did not provide a “plug-in” for the information technology (IT) experts at the JFO. The IT group assisted with setting up and maintaining phones, computers, networks, and other forms of communication, working with all the ESFs, consulting companies, and others. Perhaps the IT function could fit within logistics (we must credit Chris Neal, director of Fire Protection Publications at Oklahoma State University for this observation) or it could be a more formal part of the NRP. In short, a number of respondents felt that the ICS did not provide a proper mechanism for integrating IT into the system. Second, there were over 25 volunteer organizations working together at the JFO. In some cases, these organizations were working with ESFs but had no real connection or integration within the ICS or the NRP. In our view, we need further research to determine if these plug-in issues are attributable to the ICS or the NRP. Nonetheless, despite not having proper organizational places, IT and the volunteer organizations appeared to be accomplishing their tasks within the overall system.
Implications
Certainly, problems arose with the overall response at all levels of government, but they should not and cannot be attributed to either the use or non-use of the ICS. This short report highlights a few issues related to the use of the ICS during disaster response. Since only some ESFs used the ICS, we cannot make a firm clear assessment as to its effectiveness. However, the fact that it was not widely employed may in itself indicate that structural barriers exist for its adoption under the National Incident Management System. For example, some ESFs have their own way of doing business during disaster that they believe to be effective. Furthermore, organizations do not change their cultures overnight, and it may also be difficult for organizations to use one organizational structure during day-to-day operations and then a totally different one during a disaster. Nevertheless, despite the barriers and differences, we noted that ESFs using different response management structures were still able to communicate with each other and work together to accomplish tasks and meet victims’ needs.
We must make one comment regarding the use (or non-use) of disaster research. The disaster research community has been studying organizational response during disasters for more than half a century. The results of these many studies clearly highlight that emergent, flexible organizational structures with the capability to improvise will respond much more successfully to disasters than standard rigid bureaucratic structures. Furthermore, we know that the development, maintenance, and use of predisaster social networks are key to creating an effective disaster response. We can only hope and continue to advocate that following a future catastrophe, when our leaders decide to once again create a new federal disaster response management system, that they explicitly integrate the scientific knowledge from disaster research that has proven its validity (recognized or not) repeatedly in disasters past and present.
David M. Neal (dave.neal@okstate.edu)
John Gaete (john.gaete@okstate.edu)
Center for the Study of Disasters and Extreme Events
and
Fire and Emergency Management Program
Department of Political Science
Oklahoma State University
For those interested in some of the more technical aspects of our data gathering, when we submitted this report, we had interviewed 19 organizational respondents who represented one of the four ESFs or who had interacted with one of them. We used semistructured open-ended questions that focused on the use of the ICS during the disaster response. We also gathered extensive documents and made observations about the ICS at the JFO. The Quick Response grant from the Natural Hazards Center provided the foundation to study more comprehensively the use of the ICS at the local, state, and federal levels following Hurricane Katrina. In October, The National Science Foundation awarded Gary Webb (also of Oklahoma State University) and David Neal a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to look more broadly at the issue of the ICS in the context of Katrina. At the time of this publication, our field team has made additional field trips to Louisiana and we are currently in the process of analyzing our data. More details of our initial research and its outcomes will be available in a forthcoming Quick Response report, which will be available from the Natural Hazards Center.