Homeland Security Network Blog
The Tools of the Incident Commander
Firehouse
The Tools of the Incident Commander
by Frank Leeb
The incident commander (IC) must manage successfully and proficiently the many responsibilities of command, to best fulfill the fire service core mission of life and property preservation. These responsibilities include everyday responses, such as structural fires, calls to help the sick and injured, alarms ringing, odors of smoke or gas and automobile accidents, to name a few. However, they also include and extend to everything else that the public calls upon us to help to solve. These are awesome responsibilities that we must be prepared for.
The tools of the chief officer or IC are vastly different from those of the irons or nozzle firefighter. The firefighter who occupies the nozzle or irons position must be proficient at stretching the hoseline or forcing a door, respectively. The IC must have a wider aperture/more global view of all of the aspects of an incident. Thus, the tools of the IC are different and are intended to facilitate the IC in command and control, firefighter accountability (knowing where everyone is), resource allocation, victim tracking, and, of course, developing and implementing strategy. It’s the strategy that leads to the implementation of tactics, such as the forcing of a door.
The humble clipboard
When I was a new battalion chief attending FDNY’s battalion chief command course, many highly respected and seasoned veteran chiefs lectured on various topics. At some point, almost all of them spoke about the importance of carrying a clipboard or something else that’s capable of holding forms or other documents that assisted them as the IC.
For me, it was an aluminum clipboard that had a low-profile metal clip to hold papers in place, a hinged writing plate to keep one or two papers and a small storage compartment that could hold the several organized documents that I carried.
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