In the fall of 1970 a run of wildfires across Southern California pulled engines, crews and aircraft from many agencies. Those agencies used different words for the same equipment, ran different command structures and often could not reach each other by radio. The FIRESCOPE program that followed produced the Incident Command System, which most American responders now learn as a federal requirement without knowing it began as a California fix for specific, documented failures. This piece covers the fires, the problems that were written down afterward, and how the communications and span-of-control findings shaped the system in use today.

Fall 1970: the fires and the figures that do not agree

The fires that led to FIRESCOPE burned in late September and early October of 1970. Santa Ana wind conditions drove them across several Southern California counties, and many fires were burning at the same time. The best known is the Laguna Fire in San Diego County, which for decades was counted among the largest wildfires in California history. Other major fires burned in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, including in the Malibu area. The defining feature of the period was simultaneity. Agencies that normally fought one large fire at a time, with help from neighbors, found themselves competing for the same pool of mutual aid resources while fires in their own jurisdictions were still growing.

The casualty and loss figures for the 1970 fires are commonly repeated and seldom sourced. The version in FIRESCOPE’s own historical summary, which federal ICS training material repeats in various forms, describes a period of about two weeks in which 16 people died, more than 700 structures were destroyed, and more than half a million acres burned. Other retellings, including newspaper retrospectives and secondary fire histories, give different fatality counts, structure counts and acreage. As far as I can tell, most of the difference comes from which fires a writer includes and which dates bound the period. I have not reconciled those versions to a single source I would defend, so I give the commonly cited figures as commonly cited and not as settled.

The individual fires have their own records, and those are easier to check than the aggregate. CAL FIRE publishes a list of the largest wildfires in California, and it has carried the Laguna Fire at roughly 175,000 acres. Anyone who needs an exact figure for a single 1970 fire should take it from CAL FIRE’s current list or from the responsible agency’s records rather than from a summary paragraph. Agencies sometimes revise those lists as mapping improves, and a training slide copied from another training slide is a poor source for a number.

The documented problems: words, structure, resources and radio

The problems that came out of the 1970 fires are better documented than the totals, because they became the design requirements for what followed. FIRESCOPE’s history and the introductory ICS courses that FEMA publishes both describe them in similar terms. Agencies arriving at the same fire had no common organizational structure, so a supervisor from one department could not easily tell where he fit relative to a supervisor from another. Position titles and resource names differed from agency to agency. Nobody had a reliable, shared way to know what resources were on an incident, where they were, and whether they were working. Radio communications broke down, both because agencies operated on different frequencies with different procedures and because the channels that everyone could reach were saturated.

The FEMA introductory course frames the general weaknesses of pre-ICS responses in a way that maps closely onto the 1970 experience. It cites a lack of accountability, poor communications that come from inefficient use of the available systems and from conflicting codes and terminology, the lack of an orderly and systematic planning process, and incident commanders who were overloaded because too many people reported directly to them. That is a paraphrase of the course’s list, and the current course text is available from the FEMA Emergency Management Institute for anyone who wants the exact wording.

Some of these failures look like equipment problems on the surface, but they were organizational problems that showed up on the radio. An overloaded channel at a large fire is partly a capacity issue, and it is also the direct result of having no agreed structure that decides who needs to talk to whom. When every arriving engine company reports to the same overall commander on the same frequency, the channel fills with traffic that a division-level supervisor could have handled on another net. The radio becomes the place where the absence of an organization is heard first, and that is why the communications findings and the span-of-control findings from 1970 end up inside the same design.

FIRESCOPE: who formed it and what it was asked to build

FIRESCOPE stands for Firefighting Resources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies. Early documents spell it with “Southern California,” which reflects where the program started. Congress funded a research and development effort in the early 1970s, led by the U.S. Forest Service through its fire research work at Riverside, California. The program brought together federal, state and local fire agencies in Southern California. Accounts of the founding group list the Forest Service, the California Division of Forestry (the predecessor of today’s CAL FIRE), the state Office of Emergency Services, and the fire departments of Los Angeles City, Los Angeles County, Ventura County and Santa Barbara County. FIRESCOPE’s own published history is the place to confirm the exact membership and dates, and I would send any reader there before I would rely on a secondary list.

The program’s charge was practical. The agencies wanted to improve their ability to work together on multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction incidents, and that meant agreeing on how an incident would be organized and how resources would be ordered, tracked and coordinated across agencies when several fires competed for them. Two major products came out of the work. One was the Incident Command System, which governs how a single incident is organized. The other was the Multi-Agency Coordination System, which governs how agencies prioritize and allocate scarce resources among several incidents at once. The second product is the one that answers the specific 1970 problem of simultaneous fires, and it gets less attention than it deserves in most retellings.

ICS was developed and tested through the 1970s, and California agencies adopted it progressively over that decade. FIRESCOPE did not end when the system was finished. It continues as a California program under the state Office of Emergency Services, and it still maintains California’s ICS documents, including the field operations guide that many wildland and structural crews carry. The fact that the system came from a standing partnership of users, and not from a single agency, has a lot to do with why it was accepted, because the people who had been on the 1970 fires were the people writing the rules.

Common terminology: one request, one meaning

Common terminology sounds like the least technical part of ICS, but much of the system depends on it. In 1970 a request for a particular kind of apparatus could mean different equipment depending on who made it and who received it. A dispatcher or a mutual aid coordinator filling that request had no way to know whether the unit sent would match what the requester needed. ICS addressed this by defining standard names for organizational positions, for resources and for incident facilities. A request then meant the same thing to every agency that had adopted the system.

The ICS convention for water-carrying vehicles is the standard teaching example, and it is still a live source of confusion. Under ICS, a tanker is an aircraft and a ground vehicle that hauls water is a tender. Many structural departments in the East still call their water haulers tankers in daily use, which is a reasonable local habit until the incident involves air resources and a wildland agency on the same frequency. Position titles follow the same logic. An incident commander, a section chief, a branch director, a division or group supervisor and a strike team or task force leader each occupy a defined place in the structure, so a supervisor arriving from another agency knows the rank of responsibility from the title alone and does not have to learn the home agency’s rank system.

Facilities got common names for the same reason. An incident command post, a staging area, a base, a camp, a helibase and a helispot each mean a specific thing, and a crew told to report to staging knows that staging is where available resources wait for assignment, not where they sleep or eat. This vocabulary connects directly to the radio, because every transmission that uses an agreed term is shorter and less likely to be misunderstood than one that has to explain itself. The later national push for plain language in multi-agency incidents, which this site covers separately, grew out of the same reasoning: words and codes that only one agency understands cost airtime and create errors on a shared channel.

Span of control and the modular organization

Span of control is the number of people or units that one supervisor can effectively manage. The guidance taught in ICS and NIMS courses puts the workable range at roughly three to seven reporting elements, with five commonly given as the optimum, and the current NIMS document describes how that range can flex with the complexity of the work. On a large fire in 1970, an overall commander could easily end up with far more units than that reporting directly, because there was no agreed intermediate level to absorb them. The result was the overloaded commander described in the FEMA course material, and on the radio it showed up as one channel carrying the traffic of an entire fire.

ICS answered the span problem with a modular organization that grows and shrinks according to the incident. The incident commander keeps every function personally until the incident is large enough to need help. Then the commander delegates by function into sections: operations, planning, logistics and finance and administration. NIMS later added intelligence and investigations as an optional function that can be placed in several ways. Within operations, the organization grows by geography into divisions and by function into groups. When the number of divisions and groups exceeds a manageable span, branches are added above them. A command staff of safety, liaison and public information officers reports to the incident commander directly.

The important design choice is that expansion is triggered by span of control and by the incident’s needs, not by the rank of the people who show up. A small incident may never go beyond an incident commander and a few single resources. A large one may build out several branches without changing any of the position definitions. Because the structure is the same at every size, a supervisor from another agency who joins mid-incident can place himself in it, and the incident’s communications plan can be written against a structure that everyone already understands. When I took ICS-300 and 400 at the Center for Domestic Preparedness, the instructors spent much of the time on exactly this, because building the organization correctly at the start is easier than reorganizing it once the incident is running.

Resource management: kind, type, status and the strike team

The 1970 problem of not knowing what was on the fire, or what was available to send to the next one, led to the resource management side of ICS. Resources are described by kind, meaning what the resource is, such as an engine, a hand crew or a helicopter, and by type, meaning its capability within that kind, with lower type numbers indicating greater capability. A request for a specific kind and type tells the sending agency what is needed in terms both sides already share. The national resource typing definitions that FEMA maintains today descend from this approach, and they are the reference for current definitions.

ICS also defines how resources are grouped. A single resource is one unit with its personnel and a supervisor. A strike team is a set number of resources of the same kind and type, with a common communications capability and a leader. A task force is a combination of different kinds or types assembled for a particular task, also with common communications and a leader. Common communications is written into the definitions themselves, and that matters. A strike team leader can manage five engines as one unit because those engines can talk to the leader on an agreed channel, so the division supervisor deals with one leader and not five company officers. The grouping is a span-of-control tool and a radio-traffic tool at the same time.

Status tracking was the other half of the fix. Every resource on an ICS incident is assigned, available or out of service, and it enters the system through check-in, so the planning function can keep a current picture of what is on the incident and what can be committed. Wildland incidents have long done this with physical status cards, and many agencies now do it electronically. The method matters less than the discipline, because the 1970 failure was not knowing, and a resource that never checks in is just as invisible on a 2026 incident as it would have been in 1970.

Integrated communications: dividing the traffic by the organization

The radio failures of 1970 had two parts that are easy to confuse. Agencies could not talk to each other because they operated on different frequencies with different equipment and procedures. Where they could reach a common channel, that channel was overloaded. The first part is what most people now mean by interoperability, and decades of work on shared mutual aid channels, patching and multiband radios have gone into it. The second part is the one FIRESCOPE’s design addressed most directly through ICS itself, and it is still the part that agencies get wrong.

ICS treats communications as something planned for the incident, managed by a communications unit within the logistics section, and laid out in a radio communications plan tied to the organization chart. Command traffic between the incident commander, section chiefs and branch directors runs on a command net. Each division or group works its own tactical channel. Support traffic for logistics runs separately, and air operations get their own assignments for air-to-air and air-to-ground traffic. The intent is that a transmission goes to the level of the organization that needs it and no further. A company officer working in one division does not compete for airtime with the air operations branch or with a section chief ordering supplies. The incident radio communications plan form that carries this information is the subject of a separate article on this site, so I am leaving its mechanics out here.

The design depends on the organization being built correctly, because frequencies are assigned to positions in the structure. An incident commander who never establishes divisions has nothing to assign tactical channels to, and everyone ends up on whatever channel the first-arriving units used, which recreates the 1970 condition on a smaller scale. The national program that trains communications unit leaders formalized this role decades later, and agencies that have a trained communications unit leader available tend to build the radio plan early. Those that do not often build it after the first saturated channel forces the issue.

National adoption through NWCG and NIMS, and the myth about when ICS began

ICS spread beyond California in stages. The National Wildfire Coordinating Group adapted the FIRESCOPE system for national interagency wildland use in the 1980s as the National Interagency Incident Management System, which put ICS at the center of how federal and state wildland agencies managed large fires across the country. Structural fire departments took a more varied route. Phoenix developed its own fireground command model under Alan Brunacini during the same period, and the structural fire service spent years reconciling local command systems with ICS before the differences narrowed. Many other disciplines, including law enforcement, EMS and public works, adopted ICS unevenly through the 1980s and 1990s, often because a large incident showed them the cost of not having it.

The national requirement came after September 11, 2001. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5, issued in February 2003, directed the creation of a National Incident Management System, and the first NIMS document followed in 2004. Revised editions were published in 2008 and 2017. NIMS made ICS the standard incident management structure across disciplines and tied federal preparedness funding to NIMS adoption, which is why so many responders first encounter ICS as a training requirement attached to a grant. For current requirements, check the NIMS documents and implementation guidance that FEMA publishes, along with your state emergency management agency, because training and compliance expectations have changed more than once.

A common myth, which is a myth, holds that ICS was created after September 11 or that FEMA invented it. The record shows that ICS was developed by FIRESCOPE’s partner agencies and Forest Service researchers in California during the 1970s, was in national wildland use by the 1980s, and was adopted as the federal standard through NIMS more than thirty years after the 1970 fires. The difference matters for training. A system presented as a post-2001 federal mandate tends to be taught as a compliance exercise, whereas a system presented as fire agencies’ answer to their own documented failures on overloaded radio channels and unworkable command structures is easier to take seriously, and that second account is the one the record supports.

What to do at your agency

• The training officer pulls the radio recording or log from the largest multi-company incident your agency ran in the past year, counts how many units transmitted on each channel and how many reported directly to the incident commander, and writes up the result as a one-page case for the next officer meeting.
• The communications center supervisor compares the apparatus type names used in your CAD system with those used by each automatic and mutual aid partner, lists every case where the same word means different equipment, such as tanker and tender, and sends that list to the chiefs of the affected agencies.
• The emergency management coordinator opens each current mutual aid agreement and checks whether resources are described by the national kind and type definitions or by local names, and notes the agreements that need updated language at their next renewal.
• The radio system administrator or the agency’s trained communications unit leader adds one agenda item to the next regional mutual aid or interoperability meeting: confirming which shared channels are assigned to command and which to tactical use at multi-agency incidents.
• The shift battalion chief runs a thirty-minute tabletop at an existing shift meeting in which an incident grows from three units to fifteen. The finished product is a sketch showing where divisions or groups were established and which channel each one would use.
• The operations chief writes one paragraph into the existing multi-company operations SOP stating the unit count at which the incident commander must establish divisions or groups and assign them separate tactical channels.

Takeaways

• The fall 1970 Southern California fires burned simultaneously across several counties and drew resources from many agencies that lacked common terminology, a common command structure and workable shared radio communications.
• The commonly cited totals for the 1970 fires, about 16 deaths and more than 700 structures per FIRESCOPE’s historical summary, differ from figures in other accounts, so they should be cited as reported figures and not as settled fact.
• FIRESCOPE, a Forest Service-led partnership of federal, state and local California fire agencies, produced both the Incident Command System for single incidents and the Multi-Agency Coordination System for allocating resources among competing incidents.
• Common terminology for positions, resources and facilities let a request mean the same thing to every agency, and it shortened radio traffic on shared channels.
• Span of control, commonly taught as three to seven reporting elements with five as the optimum, drives the modular expansion of the ICS organization and also determines how much traffic each tactical channel carries.
• Strike teams and task forces are defined with common communications and a leader, which makes them a span-of-control tool and a radio-traffic tool at the same time.
• ICS addresses radio overload mainly by assigning channels to positions in the organization, so a shared interoperable channel used for everyone can recreate the congestion the 1970 agencies documented.
• The belief that ICS was created after September 11 is a myth, because the system dates from 1970s California and NIMS made it the national standard beginning in 2004.