The Incident Command System taught in every ICS-100 course did not come from FEMA, and it was not invented after September 11, 2001. California fire agencies and the U.S. Forest Service built it in the 1970s, after a run of Southern California wildfires in the fall of 1970 showed that their organizations could not work together at scale. The FIRESCOPE program that followed produced the structure national doctrine later adopted. The origin matters because ICS works best on the problem it was designed for, and agencies that treat it as timeless doctrine tend to practice it on paper rather than on incidents.

Fall 1970: the fire siege and the counts that vary

In late September 1970 a series of large wildfires broke out across Southern California during a stretch of dry fuels and strong offshore winds. The fires burned in several counties at the same time, from the San Diego backcountry north into the mountains and foothills around Los Angeles. The Laguna Fire, east of San Diego, is usually named as the largest of the group. With that many fires running at once, crews and engines from the U.S. Forest Service, the California Division of Forestry, and county and city fire departments ended up committed on the same firelines and in the same command posts, often for days, with people who had never worked together.

FIRESCOPE’s own published history describes the siege as a period of about 13 days in which 16 people died, roughly 700 structures were destroyed, and more than half a million acres burned. Those are the figures I would use, attributed to FIRESCOPE. Other retellings give different structure counts, different fire counts and different acreage, and in most cases I have checked, the difference comes from where the writer draws the boundaries of the siege, meaning which fires and which days are counted. Anyone citing a single total should name the source and the period it covers, because a structure count for the Laguna Fire alone and a count for the whole siege are different numbers and get confused in slide decks.

The weather and the fuels drove these fires, and no organizational system would have stopped Santa Ana winds. What the agencies concluded afterward was narrower. Their reviews found that their inability to coordinate made a bad situation harder to manage, because resources were requested, assigned and tracked through separate systems that did not connect. I will not put a number on homes or lives that better coordination would have saved, because nobody can test that counterfactual and the published histories do not attempt it.

What broke: the problem list behind the design

The most useful document for understanding ICS is the list of problems it was built to solve, and FEMA’s own ICS-100 course materials still carry a version of it. In paraphrase, that list includes too many people reporting to one supervisor, different organizational structures from agency to agency, a lack of reliable incident information, inadequate and incompatible communications, no structure for coordinated planning between agencies, unclear lines of authority, differences in terminology, and unclear or unstated incident objectives. Every one of those was a field observation from wildfire operations, and none was a theoretical concern raised in a planning office.

Terminology is the easiest of these to underestimate. When one agency’s “engine” carried a different pump, tank and crew size from another agency’s “engine,” an order for five engines produced five pieces of apparatus with unknown capability. The same title could mean a different level of authority depending on whose uniform the person wore, so a supervisor from one agency could not be sure what a counterpart from another agency could commit to. Resource typing, the practice of defining a resource by its capability so an order means the same thing to everyone, grew directly out of that problem.

Communications is the failure I know best, and the 1970 version is familiar to anyone who has worked radio for public safety. Each agency had bought radios and licensed frequencies for its own day-to-day needs, so a crew from one department often could not talk directly to a division supervisor from another without a relay through a dispatcher or a messenger. The radios themselves were not defective. The agencies had never planned to talk to each other on a large incident, and nobody had written down who would talk to whom on which channel. FIRESCOPE treated communications as an organizational problem as much as an equipment problem, which is why ICS places a communications unit inside the logistics section and why incident radio planning later became a formal document of its own.

FIRESCOPE: the partners, the Forest Service money and the research station

In the early 1970s Congress funded the Forest Service to work with California agencies on the coordination problem, and most histories date the program’s formal start to 1972. The name is usually spelled out as FIrefighting RESources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies. The program began as a Southern California effort and later became statewide. Research staff from the Forest Service’s fire research station in Riverside did much of the analytical work alongside the operating agencies.

The partners named in most histories are the Forest Service, the California Division of Forestry (now CAL FIRE), the state Office of Emergency Services, and the Los Angeles City, Los Angeles County, Ventura County and Santa Barbara County fire departments. The mix matters. Federal, state, county and city fire agencies each had their own chain of command, budget and legal authority, and none of them could order the others to change. Whatever came out of FIRESCOPE had to be something each agency would agree to use, which shaped the design more than any single technical requirement.

The program paired agency fire officers with researchers. Operating chiefs from the partner agencies set direction, and working groups drawn from the field developed and tested the pieces. That arrangement is the reason ICS reads like something written by people who had stood in a fire camp, because the people writing it had. FIRESCOPE still exists, and it continues to maintain California’s field operations guidance and related ICS documents. Check its current site for what it publishes, rather than relying on older copies that circulate online.

The design requirements and what came out of them

FIRESCOPE’s histories describe a set of requirements the new system had to meet. In paraphrase, it had to work for a single agency on a small incident and for many agencies on a large one, it had to adapt to any kind of emergency rather than only wildfire, and it had to expand and contract as the incident changed. It also had to use common terminology, be easy enough to learn that it would actually be used, disrupt the agencies’ existing systems as little as possible, and be affordable. The phrase “any kind of emergency” was in the requirements from the start, so ICS’s later use for floods, hazardous materials releases and planned events was intended rather than improvised.

Two products came out of the work. The first was the Incident Command System itself, which divided an incident into five functional areas (command, operations, planning, logistics, and finance and administration) and was modular, so positions were added only when the incident needed them, under a span of control guideline that limited how many people reported to any one supervisor. The system also included unified command, which lets agencies with separate legal authority set joint objectives without one of them surrendering its authority to another. The second product was the Multi-Agency Coordination System, which handled the problem above the incident: deciding how scarce resources would be allocated when several large incidents competed for the same engines and crews at the same time, which is exactly what had happened in 1970.

The partner agencies tested the system on real fires through the 1970s and revised it as they went, and by the end of the decade it was in routine use among them. The incident action plan, the written statement of objectives and assignments for an operational period, came out of the same work. It answered the problem of agencies working the same fire toward different goals. Strike teams and task forces, the standard ways of grouping resources under one leader with common communications, answered the span of control problem at the level of individual engines and crews.

Beyond California: NIIMS, Phoenix and the hazardous materials rule

The first spread was within the wildland community. The National Wildfire Coordinating Group, formed in 1976 by federal land management agencies and state forestry organizations, adapted FIRESCOPE’s ICS into the National Interagency Incident Management System in the early 1980s. That carried the structure to federal wildland fire nationwide, and it is the reason a fire team from Montana and one from Georgia can now integrate on the same incident with less friction than the agencies of 1970 managed within a single region.

Structural fire departments took a different path. The Phoenix Fire Department, under Chief Alan Brunacini, developed its own fireground command system during the same period, built for the fast, compact incidents of structural firefighting rather than for multi-day wildland campaigns. Brunacini’s book Fire Command, published by the National Fire Protection Association in the mid-1980s, spread that approach widely. For years the American fire service effectively ran two related systems, and later work by a consortium of fire service organizations reconciled them through a common set of model procedures. Some of the friction older officers still feel about ICS terminology on structure fires dates from that period of parallel systems.

The push that reached departments with no wildland exposure came from hazardous materials regulation. OSHA’s hazardous waste operations and emergency response standard, finalized in the late 1980s, requires the senior emergency response official at a hazardous substance release to take charge of an incident command system. That turned ICS from a fire service best practice into a federal workplace safety requirement for many responders, years before September 11. Anyone who has trained to the hazmat incident commander level has met ICS through that rule, and the regulation itself is the authority to read for its current text.

Through the 1980s and 1990s the National Fire Academy taught ICS to fire officers from across the country. The Academy sits within the U.S. Fire Administration, which became part of FEMA, and that institutional detail is one source of the belief that FEMA created the system.

Two origin myths: that ICS came from 9/11, or from FEMA

A common myth holds that ICS was created after the September 11 attacks, and that myth is wrong, because ICS was roughly three decades old by 2001 and already required by OSHA for hazardous materials response. What did come after September 11 was NIMS, the national framework that made ICS a condition of federal preparedness funding. Many agencies, particularly law enforcement and public works, first met ICS through NIMS training requirements after 2004, so for them it genuinely arrived after 9/11, and that experience is easy to mistake for the system’s origin.

The record from the day itself shows ICS already in use. Arlington County’s after-action report on the Pentagon response is widely cited for crediting the county’s established use of ICS and unified command, and the working relationships built before the attack, as strengths of that response. The 9/11 Commission’s final report, published in 2004, recommended that emergency response agencies nationwide adopt the Incident Command System. A commission recommends adopting something only if it already exists, so the recommendation itself undercuts the 9/11 origin story.

A second myth holds that FEMA created ICS, and that is also wrong. FEMA was established in 1979, after the FIRESCOPE agencies had already developed and field-tested the system. FEMA now maintains NIMS through its National Integration Center and delivers much of the ICS training through its Emergency Management Institute, so FEMA’s name sits on the course certificates. FEMA’s own ICS-100 materials credit the 1970 California fires as the origin, which is the simplest correction to hand a student who repeats the myth.

A third claim deserves a lighter touch. Some accounts say FIRESCOPE’s designers borrowed from military staff organization, and the functional sections do resemble a military staff structure. I have not seen a primary FIRESCOPE document that states that borrowing, so I treat military influence as plausible rather than documented, and I would describe it that way in a class.

HSPD-5 and NIMS: what 2003 and 2004 actually added

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5, issued on February 28, 2003, directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to develop and administer a National Incident Management System. The directive also made adoption of NIMS a requirement for federal preparedness assistance to states and localities, beginning in fiscal year 2005. The Department of Homeland Security published the first NIMS document in March 2004 and revised it in December 2008. The current edition, released in October 2017, replaced that 2008 revision.

NIMS adopted ICS as its incident command structure with relatively little change to the core FIRESCOPE design. The five functional areas, span of control, modular organization, unified command and the incident action plan all carried forward. What NIMS added was national scope and a federal administrative layer: a standard training curriculum running from ICS-100 through ICS-400 along with the IS-700 and IS-800 courses, national resource typing definitions, credentialing guidance, and requirements that agencies document their adoption of NIMS. The 2017 edition expanded guidance on emergency operations centers and multiagency coordination, which is the descendant of FIRESCOPE’s second product, the Multi-Agency Coordination System.

The word “mandated” needs care. NIMS adoption is tied to federal preparedness funding, so a jurisdiction that wants that funding has to meet the compliance requirements that FEMA and its state counterparts set. That is a powerful incentive, but it works through grant conditions, and the specific requirements have changed over the years. State law, OSHA rules for hazardous materials response, and local policy may impose their own obligations on top of it. Verify current NIMS requirements with your state emergency management agency rather than relying on a training slide from 2006.

What the origin tells a working agency about ICS today

ICS was built by fire officers for incidents where several agencies with separate authority had to share resources under pressure, and it performs best on that problem. It does not perform well when the agencies that will share an incident have never run it together. The FIRESCOPE partners tested the system on real fires for years before it spread, and they revised it as those fires exposed weaknesses. An agency that holds a full set of ICS course certificates but has never formally transferred command on a routine incident has the training records without the practice the system was built on.

The modular design is the most neglected part of the original intent. FIRESCOPE required a system that worked for a single engine company on a small incident and expanded only as the incident grew. Departments that treat ICS as something for large or declared incidents lose the habit of establishing command, naming the incident and announcing transfers on everyday calls, and those habits are what make the expansion work when a routine incident becomes a large one. A two-alarm fire, a multiple-vehicle crash and a long search are all reasonable places to use the structure at small scale.

Communications planning is where I see the 1970 problem recur most often, and that is the reason it gets its own paragraph here. Modern radio systems, including P25 trunked systems with shared talkgroups, solve much of the equipment side of interoperability. They do not tell a strike team leader from a neighboring county which talkgroup to use or who answers on it. The ICS 205, the incident radio communications plan, exists to settle that before the first assignment goes out, and the communications unit leader position exists so that someone owns the plan. An agency with modern radios and no written communications plan has rebuilt the organizational half of the problem FIRESCOPE identified.

The final lesson concerns where doctrine comes from. ICS succeeded because the people who would use it designed it, tested it and revised it, and agencies that copy the paperwork without that cycle of testing get a weaker system. Your after-action reports are the modern version of FIRESCOPE’s field testing, and they are only useful if somebody revises procedures based on what they find.

What to do at your agency

• Have your training officer replace any opening history slide in your ICS refresher material with the 1970 California origin as FEMA’s own ICS-100 course describes it, and confirm in writing that no slide in the deck credits ICS to 9/11 or to FEMA.
• Have your radio system administrator or communications center manager pull every ICS 205 the agency has written for an actual incident, exercise or planned event in the past two years, and if there are none, write one for the next scheduled planned event and file it with the event plan.
• Have your emergency manager ask the state emergency management agency’s NIMS coordinator for the current NIMS adoption requirements tied to preparedness grants, and file that response next to the date of the jurisdiction’s NIMS adoption resolution.
• Add one item to the agenda of your existing mutual aid or county chiefs’ meeting asking each agency to confirm that its engines, tenders and ambulances are typed using the current national resource typing definitions, and record any agency that types apparatus differently.
• Have each shift commander run a formal, radio-announced transfer of command on the next routine multi-unit incident, confirm that the dispatch log records the transfer and the incident name, and bring the log entry to the next shift officers’ meeting.
• Have your training officer compare the ICS course records for every person assigned to a command or general staff role in the emergency operations plan against the role each person is listed for, and send the emergency manager a list of any gaps.

Takeaways

• ICS was developed in the 1970s by California fire agencies and the U.S. Forest Service through the FIRESCOPE program, after the fall 1970 Southern California fire siege exposed how poorly their organizations worked together.
• FIRESCOPE’s own history describes the 1970 siege as about 13 days with 16 deaths, roughly 700 structures destroyed and more than half a million acres burned, and other retellings give different totals because they count different fires and days.
• The problems ICS was built to solve were field observations, including incompatible communications, conflicting terminology, unclear authority, overloaded supervisors and the lack of shared objectives and planning.
• FIRESCOPE produced both the Incident Command System and the Multi-Agency Coordination System, and the second was aimed at allocating scarce resources among competing incidents.
• ICS spread through national wildland fire agencies in the early 1980s, ran alongside Phoenix’s fireground command system in the structural fire service, and became a federal requirement for hazardous materials response under OSHA in the late 1980s.
• The claim that ICS began after 9/11 is a myth, because the system was decades old by then, the Pentagon response used it, and the 9/11 Commission recommended adopting an existing system.
• The claim that FEMA created ICS is also a myth, because FEMA was established in 1979 after FIRESCOPE had developed the system, and FEMA’s own course materials credit the California fires.
• HSPD-5 in 2003 and NIMS in 2004 adopted ICS nationally and tied adoption to federal preparedness funding, so verify current requirements with your state emergency management agency.