Emergency Management Training

Nine courses, taken in 2006 and kept current through the tenure — the dates on the extra courses were updated continually, through the end of 2023.

The training came before the appointment. Arriving at the City in 2005 as a senior network engineer, the position already carried a place in Logistics when the operations center activated; the formal designation as the division’s Emergency Coordination Officer followed in 2008. The sequence is the right way round and worth stating plainly: these were taken to be useful in a room, not to qualify for a title already held.

Five were independent study, establishing the doctrine and the vocabulary. Three were classroom, delivered at the City Emergency Operations Center. One was the Florida state academy. The classroom courses are the ones that matter: the independent study sequence establishes the vocabulary, and three days in a room building an Incident Action Plan with the people who would be in the operations center during an activation is what makes it usable.

Each entry below names the revision taken, not the revision current now. The doctrine moved, and a credential that quietly claims the newer version is a credential that misrepresents itself.

Independent study

IS-100.a — Introduction to the Incident Command System. Two hours, 0.2 continuing education units, completed with examination. Developed by the Emergency Management Institute with the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, the Department of Agriculture and the US Fire Administration. Covers the history, features and principles of the Incident Command System, its organizational structure, and the roles of the Incident Commander, Command Staff and General Staff. Intended for anyone who may hold any role in an incident at all, which is the point — ICS only works if the people arriving already share its assumptions. The formal prerequisite for IS-200 and part of the prerequisite set for ICS-300 and ICS-400. Taken at revision .a; the current revision is IS-100.c.

IS-200 — ICS for Single Resources and Initial Action Incidents. Four hours, 0.4 continuing education units, completed with examination. Where ICS-100 describes the structure, this covers operating inside it: how the NIMS management characteristics relate to Incident and Unified Command, delegation of authority and implementing authorities, management by objectives, and the ICS tools that carry them. It also covers briefings, meetings and the transfer-of-command procedure — the part that decides whether an incident survives a shift change. Intended for supervisory response personnel; prerequisite IS-100. FEMA has since renamed the course “Basic Incident Command System for Initial Response”; the title here is the one it carried when taken, and FEMA states that for credentialing purposes the revisions are equivalent.

IS-700 — National Incident Management System. Roughly three and a half hours, 0.4 continuing education units, completed with examination. NIMS is the framework that lets government, non-governmental organizations and the private sector work the same incident without first negotiating how. The course covers its concepts, principles and components across prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery — the vocabulary everything above it assumes. It is the baseline NIMS requirement for all incident personnel and a prerequisite for ICS-300 and ICS-400. Taken at the original revision; FEMA has since issued IS-700.a and IS-700.b, the latter reflecting the 2017 NIMS revision rather than the doctrine current when this was taken. The same course was pushed out to the wider division afterwards, with staff certificates collected for the Emergency Preparedness file.

IS-800.B — National Response Framework. Roughly three hours, 0.3 continuing education units, completed with examination. The National Response Framework sets out how the nation responds to all hazards: the roles and responsibilities of response partners, the response core capabilities and the actions that deliver them, the coordinating structures, and operational planning. It is the layer that answers what happens when an incident outgrows the jurisdiction that started managing it. Revision B corresponds to the first edition of the Framework, published January 2008. The current revision is IS-800.D, which adds the seven Community Lifelines — a construct that did not exist in the doctrine taken here.

IS-546 — Continuity of Operations Awareness. Approximately one hour, giving a working grounding in continuity of operations planning for a general audience. Short, and the shallowest of the nine — but it sits under the continuity work that followed: the City of Jacksonville departmental plan, the Pandemic Continuity of Operations Plan of June 2009, and the disaster recovery tiering that came out of both. FEMA has since retired this course; its continuity awareness content is now carried by IS-1300, Introduction to Continuity of Operations, and the instructor-led continuity curriculum has moved to the E/L/K-1301 and 1302 sequence.

Classroom, at the City Emergency Operations Center

ICS-300 — Intermediate Incident Command System. Three days. FEMA curriculum, delivered through state and local training officers rather than by FEMA directly. Covers Incident Command System practice on expanding, Type 3 incidents: developing an Incident Action Plan as a group, how the Command and General Staff sections actually interact, unified command, and managing an incident or event from either an incident command post or an emergency operations center. Prerequisites are IS-100, IS-200, IS-700 and IS-800; ICS-300 is itself the prerequisite for ICS-400.

ICS-400 — Advanced ICS, Command and General Staff. Two days, sixteen hours. The top of the Incident Command System sequence. Covers what is required to perform in a management capacity on major and complex incidents: area command, multiagency coordination groups, and emergency operations center management. Assessed through activities and a final examination. Intended for experienced senior personnel who may serve as Incident Commander, within Unified Command, on Command or General Staff, or in emergency operations center management. Prerequisite is ICS-300 plus the full independent study set. This is the qualification behind the Emergency Coordination Officer role and seven live activations — and behind writing continuity plans on Incident Command System doctrine rather than on a template.

MGT-331 — Preparing the States: Implementing Continuity of Operations Planning. Two days. Developed and delivered by the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security under Department of Homeland Security contract, and certified by FEMA’s National Training and Education Division. Offered to jurisdictions through state administrative agencies at no cost to the student, which is why it appears on state course cross-reference lists rather than in FEMA’s own catalog. The direct-delivery course runs to eleven modules on building a jurisdiction-level continuity of operations plan. It is the most directly applied of the nine: the City of Jacksonville departmental continuity plan — two hundred pages written against Duval County’s Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan and structured on Incident Command System doctrine — is what this course was taken in order to write. The course appears to have been retired; it is no longer listed in the current national training catalog.

State academy

EM-01 — Basic Emergency Management Academy, Florida Division of Emergency Management. Taken alongside the federal sequence.

This one is deliberately short. The course number is a legacy Florida Division of Emergency Management code predating the state’s realignment of its training programs, and no official description of it survives in the Division’s current or archived listings. Rather than describe it from inference, the record states the title, the issuing body and nothing further.

Courses