| John M. Eller |
Dealing With The Critical Incident
| John M. Eller has been Police Chief in Brookhaven, PA, since 1981. In addition to being a columnist for 9-1-1 Magazine, he is a certified Police Instructor, Consultant, Criminal Justice Instructor, Weekly Newspaper Columnist and Cablevision talk show host. |
This article can be found on
page 55 of the Mar/Apr 1998
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
The Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings, plane crashes such as United Flight 232 in Sioux City and the Value Jet crash in the Florida Everglades will be forever etched in the minds of those who were there. Critical incidents such as explosions, plane crashes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and hazmat incidents are becoming more commonplace in our Modern day world.
A critical incident is defined on any natural or man-made event of unusual or severe nature which threatens to cause or causes the loss of life or injury to citizens and/or severe damage to property, which requires extraordinary measures to protect lives, meet human needs, and achieve recovery.
How do those of us in the emergency services field dea1 with critical incidents and crisis situations, especially if we have never experienced one? The answer is: training, and lots of it. This may not be a problem for large agencies with abundant training resources. Small agencies, though, need to coordinate their efforts with other departments, just as they would in the event of a critical incident itself.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) provides training to law enforcement agencies throughout the United States regarding "Critical Incident Management." The IACP points out in their training manual that there are significant differences between law enforcement, the fire service and EMS disciplines.
Both EMS and the fire service purchase equipment and then provide staffing to assure a certain level of service is provided to the community, and they function in teams during their day-to-day responsibilities. When these teams respond to a normal incident they more than likely perform a role similar to one they would perform during a time of crisis. Command officers perform tasks similar to those they would be assigned to during crisis situations, with the coordination required and scale of involvement being expanded.
Law enforcement personnel, particularly those who work in patrol, are routinely assigned to work as individuals, with little or no immediate on-the-spot supervision. Police officers are given a lot of discretion on how to deal with day-to-day incidents. These same law officers who routinely work as individuals will probably be among the first to arrive on the scene of a critical incident. They are trained in law enforcement tactics, not in rescue operations. Upon their arrival on the scene of a critical incident, they may act individually to try and rescue injured persons, instead of working in a coordinated effort with other members of an integrated rescue team to effectively mitigate the results of the emergency.
A few years ago I attended a training seminar given by Bob Mathis, manager of IACP's Police Education and Training Division. Mathis dealt with two major critical incidents during his 25-year career with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department. One was the Hyatt-Regency Hotel disaster in 1981, in which 113 people died and 188 were injured; the second was an ammonium-nitrate explosion in 1989 in which 6 firefighters lost their lives.
Mathis pointed out common problem areas which need to be dealt with during the initial stages of incident response:
Direction and Control: Setting up a command structure in order to provide authority, under which responders are controlled and their action directed in a coherent manner, striving to achieve the objectives necessary to stabilize the incident.
Resource Allocation and Utilization: The command structure needs to insure that it can mobilize adequate resources through which operational and support functions can be implemented.
Communications: Clear and effective communications are essential when directing the operation, whether it's by radio, telephone, or interpersonally.
Stress: The greater the risks and the less personnel sense that they are in control of a situation, the greater the chance that decision-making and interpersonal reactions will suffer.
The IACP cautions that, during a critical incident, either you initiate actions to take control of events, or the events will control you.
Mathis and Associates publish a list of stabilization activities which Incident Commanders need to address after arriving on the scene of a critical incident. I will address these stabilization activities in another column.
