II. Executive Summary
A highway incident is a planned or unplanned event that disrupts the normal operation of the transportation system and requires a short-term response by one or more agencies for the purpose of rescue, control, and/or mitigation. Highway incidents vary widely in severity from vehicle disablements and minor crashes involving a single agency response (e.g., law enforcement or service patrol) to a natural disaster or other catastrophe creating a regional impact and necessitating a multi-agency response across disciplines and jurisdictions. The life cycle of a highway incident encompasses many distinct activities where each activity represents a priority of a specific agency and its expert practitioner or response crew. This dynamic response process demands interagency coordination and collaboration in the sense that responders must cultivate a working trust with one another, transfer command and control when necessary, and ensure sufficient on-scene resources exist at all times. Responders must collectively follow a proactive approach rather than just reacting to each unfolding situation. Implementation of a formal management process, such as the ICS, may overcome these challenges by eliminating ambiguity in command and control, improving resource coordination and communications, and facilitating the application of standard guidelines and operating procedures to day-to-day highway incident management.
ICS is a management system designed to enable effective and efficient domestic incident management by integrating a combination of facilities, equipment, personnel, procedures, and communications operating within a common organizational structure. ICS may be implemented for any highway incident at any severity level. It is designed for use from the time of first responder arrives on the scene until the use of ICS is no longer warranted.
Using the Incident Command System at Highway Incidents is a two-day course with representatives of transportation organizations and towing and recovery companies as its target audience. Transportation agencies own and operate the highway system. Towing and recovery companies play an indispensable role in effecting incident removal and restoring the affected road section back to normal operation. These stakeholders serve a prominent role in day-to-day highway incident management but may require a more substantive understanding of their function under an established ICS where a multi-agency team of responders employ a management tool that provides for the command, control, and coordination of resources at the scene of a highway incident through a structure and procedures for organizing personnel, facilities, and equipment.
The governing document for this course is the National Incident Management System (NIMS) from the Department of Homeland Security. This course provides an effective balance of instruction and participant interaction and practice to enable participants to easily extract and apply the key concepts, principles, guidelines, and procedures of the ICS for any highway incident. Through the completion of course exercises that allow participants to develop custom products based on the stakeholders and resources available in their area, participants will have a head start in supporting a proactive, multi-agency response to highway incidents ranging from traffic incidents to relatively uncommon emergencies where transportation resources and technology applications may represent critical factors in public safety and the overall efficiency of a jurisdiction or region response.
This course covers the following key ICS topics:
- Management characteristics of the ICS
- Major functional areas of the ICS organization
- Unified Command organization and application
- Major organizational elements of the ICS Operations Section
- Programs to achieve agency preparedness
- Concepts and processes for managing resources and communications and information
- Guidelines and procedures for establishing ICS
- Steps in preparing an Incident Action Plan
- Considerations for establishing an Incident Command Post and staging areas
ICS is extremely comprehensive so it requires training and study to completely understand the command and control protocol that drives its operation at the scene of a highway incident. This training course will help transportation professionals become a full partner in local and region-wide ICS operations as the NIMS is adopted throughout the country. Course lectures and tabletop exercises will illustrate the integration path that an ICS organizational structure must take to support highway incident management policies, guidelines, and procedures. Finally, this training course will satisfy the need to provide transportation personnel a lasting reference and specific applications of ICS configured to local highway incident management activities.
