This led to the issuance of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) applied by the United States Department of Homeland Security in 2004. The main objective of this research article was to examine a single component of the NIMS (Incident Command System) with the aim of measuring its acceptance and utilization by the first responder organizations and selected allied disciplines in the case of Ohio (Decker, 2011)
For instance, hurricane Floyd in Florida received a lot of criticism due to what was termed as unnecessary evacuation procedures. The Division of Emergency Management had thought their plan to carry out large scale evacuation in all areas that were perceived to be in extreme danger was practical (Husock and Howitt, 1)
The staff within the incident command were deemed inexperienced since in three years, they had dealt with five hurricanes and they were expected to have mastered situations that would require such a massive evacuation operation. During the September 11 attacks, Chief Plaugher, who was identified as the public face of the unfolding events at the time, noticed that in the efforts to rescue the injured and evacuate workers trapped in buildings, they had overlooked one very important factor: dispensing information on the pentagon attack to the media (Varley and Howitt, 22)
Information-sharing is critical during a natural disaster during which the clock is ticking. The most effective means of communication were cellphones and the Internet (Garnett & Kouzmin 2007: 179)
The city, however, although it did have a disaster mitigation plan was not fully prepared for the extent of the damage which included three significant breaches of the levees. The city filled up with water, leaving residents scrambling for their roofs (Scott 2006: 27)
In contrast, biological events such as SARS, which had a devastating impact upon the city of Toronto (as well as Asia) can be much more difficult to anticipate in terms of their severity and method of transmission. Indeed, SARS had only been targeted by WHO as a threat three weeks before the Toronto outbreak (Varley 2005: 2)