In-Command Communications

It’s happened. You’re a company officer, and you and your crew are going to be arriving first on what looks like a major incident. All the “adult supervision” units (battalion chiefs, division chiefs) are delayed. While you know you’ll be handing this off at some point and returning to your comfort zone with your crew, as a “working boss” right now, you need to take a step back from playing quarterback and assume the role of the head coach—organizing the offense, calling in the plays, reading the defense and planning for a few plays down the line or until you transfer command. How you set up this incident and how you use your channels of communication, including the way you communicate, are crucial to your success.

Are you prepared?

As company officers, we lay awake at night and envision that day when we will be the incident commander (IC) on a rapidly scaling incident. Questions swirl through our minds:

• Will all of those classes and all of that simulator training pay off?
• Have I practiced size-ups and radio messaging enough?
• Have I picked a senior mentor who is competent and calm when things are going bad? 
• Have I reviewed my communications plans and procedures?
• Will I ultimately hand over the incident as a confusing mess or will it be a well-organized attack that anyone can inherit and continue to manage? 

Forces of nature and the dynamics of an emergency will always be pushing the incident toward the former—a clustered, disorganized and chaotic mess. Planning, training and repetitive practice will help you remedy the chaos and enable you to hand over an incident that’s well-organized to the first-arriving chief.

The NIOSH 5

Firefighters and emergency workers can get lost, hurt or killed at incidents when any one of five causal factors, identified by The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), are in play:

1. Improper risk assessment
2. Lack of incident command
3. Lack of accountability
4. Inadequate communications
5. Lack of SOPs (or failure to follow established SOPs)

As students of the emergency game, we’ve come to know these as the “NIOSH 5.” Statistically, 50 percent of these line-of-duty deaths (LODDs) and injury events occur in the first 15 minutes of an incident. Half of those occur in the first 3 minutes! If you are the initial IC, it’s statistically likely this could happen while you’re in charge (see Figure 2). 

In every emergency, there are things you cannot control. However, incident communications, incident command and accountability are factors you CAN control through training so as to not let the “NIOSH 5” creep up on you.

On the scene

In incident management, set up is everything and often determines the outcome of the incident. To use another sports analogy (this time from baseball), you definitely want your first pitch to be a strike. So how do you do that? 

Provide a solid size-up

The first step is taking a deep breath and giving a good size-up. Clear and concise on-scene conditions reports set the tone for any incident and establish solid communications and command tone. Practice and pretend to be cool on the radio even if you’re freaking out on the inside. Your tone and tempo in your size-up will help focus everyone and create a tactics-driven incident rather than an emotions-driven incident. 

In our agency, the initial size-up report requires four things: what you see, the area you see it affecting, what’s happening or what’s on fire or causing the hazard, and establishing command. Keep it simple and brief. YOU are in command so it’s time to call the shots!

Order resources early and often

Tunnel vision is a death sentence for any IC. In most cases, this is NOT the time to get sucked into task-level problems. The exception to that in our agency is a structure fire with a known rescue. In this case, the company officer performs as part of their crew to rescue a savable victim after passing command. For the purposes of this article, however, we’ll stay within the framework that there is no known rescues or other impending needs and the company officer is performing as the IC. Somebody has to step back, take in the big picture and make decisions. If you’re the first-arriving company officer, that’s your job, and your crews’ safety and success depends on your command presence and decision-making.

Ask yourself: “What will this incident do in 5 minutes? 10? 20? One hour?” If the answer to these questions is “get bigger,” then you need more resources. Order them early and often because they can always be turned around if in the end your on-scene crews handle the problem. Too many times, we’ve allowed machismo and arrogance to cloud our judgment only to injure (or worse) first responders because we tried to do too much with too little.

When ordering additional resources take into account that greater alarm tones and dispatch information will eat up radio bandwidth and could make it very difficult to communicate for at least a minute or two. Make sure your on-scene crews communicate on the tactical channels while the main or dispatch channels are tied up. It’s a red flag if during this portion of the incident you don’t have solid accountability because it’s during this particular fog of war that we lose track of crews.

Segment and subdivide

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Use your knowledge of ICS to break up the incident into manageable bites. Knowing where your people need to deploy and what channel they’re on is critical to accountability. When a higher-ranking authority arrives, they’ll have simple questions: Where is everybody? What are they doing? How are they doing? How do I talk to them, meaning what do I call them over the radio and on what channel?

Using divisions and groups can make your life easier in this regard especially as the incident is growing rapidly. Forming divisions and groups on a rapidly developing incident ensures that you’re talking to as few people as possible. This method enables you as the IC to get a “bird’s-eye view” through concise conditions reports from area or task supervisors rather than checking on every single resource on your initial response.

If this incident is getting bigger before your eyes, or your supervisors are not giving favorable Conditions-Actions-Needs (CAN) reports, keep ordering more resources! Adjust strategy and tactics for what you and your crews can handle in the present while forecasting for the immediate and distant future. In this respect, you may want to consider creating “Phantom” or empty divisions and groups in critical areas of the incident. 

Phantom divisions are essentially mental placeholders where you’ll need resources deployed as soon as they become available. However, you can’t fill these jobs immediately because you have to prioritize and overload the most critical aspects of the incident. 

You can and should account for these “phantom” divisions or groups on your tactical worksheet or incident tracking software. No matter how you track your resources, I strongly caution against trying to keep this all up in your head. That is a quick path to disaster and disorganization.

Real-life incident

The following example is from one of the very first incidents I commanded as a captain. Although this particular example is from a wildland/urban incident (WUI) fire, these concepts can be applied to any rapidly scaling incident in any type of hazard zone.

My agency is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and we get every type of emergency call imaginable, including WUI fires. Drought conditions prevail all over the East Bay region. This incident occurred on a mild spring day in 2014.

The initial dispatch pattern only called for two engines, as this was early fire season and within our city limits so we were already under-resourced. The first-arriving engine was from another agency, and the officer elected to pass command and attempted to extinguish the fire.

The initial officer’s size-up described a small fire with potential to spread rapidly up a steep slope into heavier brush. As the second-due officer, I assumed command and performed my own size-up to note changing conditions as a benchmark to formulate my strategic and tactical plan. The fire had doubled in size and was progressing rapidly uphill into heavier brush, just as the initial officer had forecasted. We had large powerlines overhead, and if the fire was allowed to progress unchecked, it would burn into two separate subdivisions. 

As a new captain, this was overwhelming at first, but thanks to my previous training, I was able to clearly size up the fire and, more importantly, order the appropriate resources. At the outset, I requested to “fill out” the first alarm and second alarm for the brush fire, plus a structure protection response (five engines and a battalion chief) and a full Cal Fire response, which would get me additional engines, hand crews and most importantly air attack.

This incident was scaling rapidly, and there were two priority problems at the outset: 1) the hot flank of the fire progressing toward one neighborhood and 2) the head of the fire that was headed toward an additional subdivision. These houses would burn if we didn’t get crews on them right away. In fact, the first-arriving engine captain for structure protection reported “several homes threatened” and that they were “protecting two.” He proceeded to request additional resources and also advised that conditions were worsening.

Figure 1 shows how I initially laid out the incident. You’ll notice that there are three geographic divisions and one Structure Protection Group plus a Command Group. Only the Structure Protection Group and Division Alpha were assigned resources because those were my only available resources at the time. In my mind, and on my tactical worksheet (tablet worksheet), I created phantom divisions. I knew I would need resources eventually as the incident grew, but I had to prioritize my available resources to the largest problems at hand—the hot flank (Division Alpha) and the several structures that were being immediately threatened (Structure Protection Group).

Radio discipline and communications knowledge are both key in any dynamic and/or greater-alarm incident. Efficient communication is best achieved by having all division and group supervisors speak to the IC on a TAC channel. This communications plan is likely to evolve as the incident grows, but as a first-in company officer, you’re doing well if you have three or four division or group supervisors talking to you on one TAC channel. This is a good foundation for any incoming chief or incident management team to inherit. From this platform, they can add more complexity into the communications plan and the incident structure and, most importantly, know WHERE everyone is, WHAT their job is and HOW to communicate with them. Keeping it simple with the organizational structure that you’re familiar with is the safest way to proceed into a dynamic and dangerous incident.

Overall the incident was a success because neither citizens nor firefighters sustained any injuries and we kept the fire from burning down homes. Several of the residences suffered some damage to their exterior and some homeowners lost out-buildings like sheds, but no homes were lost. The fire was limited to about 12 acres, which in the WUI scope is a tiny speck, but when those 12 dry acres are surrounded by humanity, this can pose problems. Local and state agencies worked very hard that day to keep damage to a bare minimum.

In sum

There will come a time in your career as a company officer where you’re going to be in command of a major incident and you will be alone for some amount of time. An initial report of a smoke alarm can actually be a multistory apartment fire with multiple rescues, or a man down on the sidewalk can actually be an active shooter with several more victims in a large area. There are several instances throughout the emergency services where companies arrived at what they thought was a low-level incident only to find themselves in the throes of a high-risk/low-frequency event that would require a complex command structure.

Incident set-up, management and communications are key to handing off a well-organized incident to incoming management teams or chiefs. Early entry into ICS organization with the deployment of divisions and groups, along with the disciplined use of tactical channels, is critical to transferring over a well-organized incident to the incoming IC. Although the incident may be total chaos, managing that incident does not have to be a clustered mess so long as you remain calm, provide for safety and stay organized in your approach.