Incident Command System Archives

Updated April 27, 2022

(Updated April 27, 2022 to reflect the revisions for 2022)

You may have seen new symbols on wildfire maps this year. That is because the National Wildfire Coordinating Group approved new symbology again, this time for the 2022 fire season.

They were developed by the NWCG Data Management Committee and are now part of the Incident Command System Standards for Geospatial Operations. Many of the new symbols introduced in the last few years are for various types of fireline, such as Planned Hand Line, Planned Mixed Construction Line, Planned Road as Line, Planned Secondary Line, Temporary Flight Restriction, Foam Drop, Retardant Drop, Escape Route, plus — Structure Wrap, Retardant in Avoidance Area, UAS Launch and Recovery Zone, and many more.

Some of the new symbols will be fairly easy to remember. Others, not so much. A map in color will be necessary to easily differentiate a few of them, such as Fence vs. Other vs. Road Repair, and the three types of drops, Water, Foam, and Retardant. Most maps have legends to make the interpretation easier, and ArcGIS Pro has a filter to only display the features used on the map.

The image above is moderate resolution; a high-resolution pdf version (2.9 MB) can be downloaded.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Katei and Steve.

The wildfires in 1970 brought about FIRESCOPE, changing the way emergencies are managed

Wildfires in Southern California, 1970 map — Wildfires in Southern California, 1970. Capital Public Radio.

FIRESCOPE has produced a video that describes the evolution of the Incident Command System after the disastrous fire season of 1970.

(UPDATE May 21, 2019: the video has been removed from YouTube, apparently due to a copyright issue.)

Here are more details:

During a 13-day period in Southern California in 1970, 773 wildfires burned 576,508 acres, destroyed 722 homes and killed 16 people. At the time there was no widely accepted interagency standard for organizing a management structure at an emergency or for sharing resources across agency and state boundaries. To help deal with these issues the federal government funded a project in Southern California called “FIrefighting REsources of Southern California Organized for Potential Emergencies” — FIRESCOPE. Later when the rest of the state bought into the effort the name was changed, leaving out the word “Southern”, becoming “FIrefighting RESources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies”, but retaining the same acronym, FIRESCOPE.

In the early 1970s tests of the Incident Command System, later also known as the National Interagency Incident Management System (NIIMS), began. By 1982 NIIMS and the Multi-Agency Coordination System (MACS) developed by FIRESCOPE had been fully implemented in some areas. In 1987, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recognized the value of the management concepts of ICS/NIIMS and MACS when used for many types of incidents. Sixteen months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks the President ordered the Director of Homeland Security to develop, submit for review, and administer a National Incident Management System (NIMS). The next year the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security issued a memorandum formally adopting the National Incident Management System (NIMS) as the national model. NIMS was built upon NIIMS and was very recognizable to first responders who had been using it since 1982.

After the fires of 1970 California state agencies released what is now a classic film, “Countdown to Calamity”.