Response is primarily about protecting life, critical infrastructure, property and the environment.
How do we coordinate and respond?
Response
This involves actions taken in anticipation of, during, and immediately after an emergency to minimise its effects and so people affected have immediate relief and support. A key feature of response is the provision of timely warnings and information to enable the community to act to protect themselves.
- First responders to an emergency are often the local community and local emergency responders
- Arrangements include systems for incident management, unity of command and coordination, and effective communication
- Response arrangements are scalable and flexible.
In Tasmania, fire and emergency services and other emergency management partner agencies/organisations have adopted – or adapted – a common system of incident management: Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS). Tasmanian Police have adopted a very similar system of incident management in line with other police services around Australia: Incident Command and Control System Plus (ICCS+).
Coordinate
The Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS) uses an incident classification model which identifies three levels of incident response, from one to three, in ascending order of complexity.
The AIIMS incident levels are noted as equivalent to the Tasmanian municipal, regional and State arrangements.
- Level 1 = Municipal arrangements- can be resolved with local or initial response resources
- Level 2 = Regional arrangements -more complex either in size, resources or risk
- Level 3 = State arrangements-has complexity that may require state-wide management of the situation. These incidents will usually involve delegating functions.
AIIMS Incident levels do not necessarily fit comfortably within the three levels of Tasmania’s emergency management arrangements or for some hazards and escalation of incident levels. Incident levels also reflect complexity, risk and resourcing requirements.
Local to National Coordination Pathway
Be aware there are arrangements for national crisis coordination. Some sectors (e.g. Health) have different national response and recovery coordination models from the traditional emergency management model summarised below, click to reveal:
Maintains overview of State’s commitments and potential external resource requirements
- Maintains state-wide overview of various agencies’ commitments and potential for external resourcing if required
- Assists regional and local level response by coordinating resources (including external resourcing if required)
- Overseeing consequence management and early recovery planning.
Maintains overview of the activities, resources and consequence management of incident/s occurring within the region.
Owner/Manager or RMA responsible for managing activities at the incident site and resolving the incident.