This paper aims to look at how the Incident Command System (ICS) plays a role in 21st century crises. Both legacy and recent disasters will be analysed to determine the ICS’s role and how government organisations at all levels, non-government organisations (NGO), and communities can come together for a unified structure to combat these increasingly frequent incidents. FEMA (2018, 10) notes that the Incident Command System (ICS) is a framework that can apply across several disciplines enabling incident managers from different organisations to work seamlessly together by providing a standardised approach to command, control, and coordination which allows for a common hierarchy where these organisations can be effective. The paper will go on to determine if this older framework, initially established to fight wildfires in California during the 1970’s (Bigley and Roberts, 2001; Lutz and Lindell, 2008) is still of benefit to these modern crises.
Crises events, whether on a large scale and involving multiple organisations from different sectors, or whether a localised incident which may only involve a few local agencies; the ICS is a framework that has displayed itself as a robust, go-to framework for command and control throughout many incidents, “ICS-based organisations may perform more reliably under extreme conditions than organisations founded on alternative approaches”. (Bigley and Roberts, 2001, 1281). So, is this a legacy framework for legacy crises, or is the very framework that was set up to support these older crises evolved to match the speed and complexity of the 21st century?
