Training Day

All day yesterday and today, and then next Wednesday and Thursday, I'm in federally mandated National Incident Management System (NIMS) training.

I'm not alone:


NIMS was put in place to provide a consistent, nationwide template that enables federal, state and local governments to work together in preparation for, prevention of, response to and recovery from disasters.

Fire Chief Dennis Downs and Lisa Derderian, our emergency management coordinator, are leading the training.




The training has included small-group exercises to make disaster planning and response decisions based on various scenarios.

I'm in Team 2 during these exercises. Team 2's incident commander is Larry Hammond (second from left with Chief Downs looking on), who in real life is our purchasing administrator. Under NIMS, the incident commander oversees the incident response and is the final authority on decisions.


Then the various teams reported out on how they would handle decisions during disasters, from public safety to infrastructure repair to evacuation logistics to filling out obligatory federal forms.

Here's Andy Green, our director of finance, reporting out for his group:


Roumiana Voutchkova, one of our water engineers...


And Jon Pollard, our code compliance manager:



Of course, there's a critical PIO function to any disaster, which I'll explain later.

Stay tuned for more after the training is completed, including what I learned and why it matters.