FEMA history

It wasn’t until 1972 when FIRESCOPE was formed that this need was recognized and the concept of ICS was first discussed.

When the FIRESCOPE Program Charter was formally approved in 1973, there were seven partner agencies.

In March of 1974, the first publication on the system titled the Field Command Operations System Conceptual Design Description was released.

In 1975, a more permanent OCC was established in a vacant Los Angeles County fire station in El Monte, California.

By 1976, the focus began to unofficially shift into the development of an all-risk, all-hazard system that could be used to manage an incident of any nature.

President Carter signed Executive Order 12127, effective April 1, 1979, establishing FEMA. Shortly after, in signing Executive Order 12148 on July 20, 1979, President Carter gave the agency the dual mission of emergency management and civil defense.

While the 1982 FIRESCOPE budget cuts did not seem to impact the national implementation of ICS, the same is not true for MACS. With only 40% of MACS developed when the funding stopped, MACS concepts did not proliferate or evolve with the same success.

The SBCSD persuaded the California Police Standards and Training Commission (POST) to sponsor training in the law enforcement version of ICS and it was first conducted in 1986. For example, in 1984 the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department (SBCSD) conducted a project to make ICS applicable to the diverse emergencies confronted by law enforcement.

The SBCSD persuaded the California Police Standards and Training Commission (POST) to sponsor training in the law enforcement version of ICS and it was first conducted in 1986.

In 1991 Coast Guard Marine Safety Office (MSO) Puget Sound used ICS to manage a collision case involving a fishing vessel and a container vessel.

In 2002 the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) introduced the CIFFC ICS Canadian Version doctrine along with a complete set of training materials to the wildland fire community across Canada as part of its mandate to its provincial, territorial, and federal members.

Since 2004 there have been challenges in the national implementation of NIMS, to include ICS and MACS implementation.

In August 2005 the historic Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi, causing large-scale devastation along the Gulf Coast, displacing families to all 50 states and resulting in billions in losses to infrastructure and the economy.

A member of the development Task Force noted that they “had to build a system that worked for a dumpster fire, a high-rise fire, a flood, or a major Haz-Mat incident” (Robert Irwin, quote from Barbera and Stambler, Engineering the Incident Command and Multiagency Coordination Systems, 2011).