#7 1972 · California fire services · Emergency management
California's fire agencies built one command system after burning separately
the problem
Every big fire became a jurisdiction fight
background
In a 13-day stretch of September 1970, 773 wildfires burned across Southern California, killing 16 people and destroying 722 homes — and much of the failure was not the fire but the response: agencies fighting the same blaze had no shared command structure, and "numerous problems with communication and coordination hampered their effectiveness."
An interagency group called FIRESCOPE was formed to fix the coordination problem directly rather than pour more money into equipment or manpower. Its first Technical Team was established in 1973 to design a shared management structure, which became the Incident Command System: one incident commander, modular roles that scale up or down, and terminology every agency agreed to use the same way — parts of it were already being used successfully on major incidents by 1980.
what everyone would do
The instinctive response to a catastrophic firefighting failure is to fund more of what already exists — more trucks, more crews, more equipment, faster response times. That treats the 1970 fires as a capacity problem, but the actual failure mode was coordination: agencies fighting the same blaze had no shared command structure and no common terminology, so more resources thrown into an uncoordinated response would have meant more equipment tripping over the same jurisdictional confusion, not a better-managed fire.
what they saw
FIRESCOPE's designers saw that the problem wasn't any single agency's competence — every department was doing its job well within its own boundaries — it was that a big fire doesn't respect agency boundaries, and nothing forced independent organizations to combine into one coherent operation when a fire crossed from one jurisdiction into another. The fix wasn't more resources or better individual agencies, it was a shared structure — one commander, common vocabulary, modular roles — that any agency could plug into without giving up its own identity or chain of command back home.
the move
After catastrophic wildfire coordination failures, agencies built the Incident Command System: one commander, modular roles, common terminology.
why it works
Designating a single incident commander for a given fire, regardless of which agency's territory it started in, eliminates the coordination vacuum where competing chains of command used to collide — everyone reports into one structure for the duration of that incident, so decisions get made once instead of negotiated agency-by-agency in real time. Standardizing terminology and modular role definitions means personnel from different departments who have never worked together can slot into the same command structure immediately, because 'division supervisor' or 'staging area' means the same thing regardless of which agency the person wearing that badge normally works for. Because the roles scale up or down with the incident's size, the same structure handles a small brush fire and a multi-county disaster without needing a different system for each — which is exactly why it generalized so far past wildfire into hospitals, utilities and eventually software incident response: any domain with the same underlying problem (independent teams needing to combine on short notice) gets the same fix.
the payoff
ICS became the US national standard and was adopted far beyond fire — hospitals, utilities, and eventually software incident response.
where it breaks
The system depends on every participating agency actually adopting and training on the same terminology and command structure in advance — a structure imposed only on paper, without the shared drilling FIRESCOPE agencies did through the 1970s, leaves personnel unable to execute it fluently under the pressure of a real incident. It also requires agencies to be willing to subordinate their own command authority to a single incident commander for the duration of an event, which can create real friction when multiple agencies each believe their own leadership should be in charge, or when political or jurisdictional stakes make ceding command visibly costly. And a single-commander structure only helps when the actual bottleneck is coordination; it does nothing to fix a response that's failing because of genuine resource shortages, technical incapacity, or missing expertise no amount of clean command structure can supply.
what came after
The Department of Homeland Security folded ICS into the National Incident Management System in 2004, making it mandatory for any agency receiving federal preparedness funding, and hospitals adapted it as the Hospital Incident Command System starting in the late 1980s. The core insight — a single commander and shared vocabulary let separate organisations plug into one operation without surrendering their own chains of command — outlived the specific fires it was built for and is now the default template any sector reaches for when multiple independent teams must run one response together.
references
- [1]The wildfires in 1970 brought about FIRESCOPE, changing the way emergencies are managedWildfire Today, 2020wildfiretoday.com
- [2]History of ICSLAFD Support Service, 2021lafdsupportservice.net
- [3]Hospital incident command system (US)Wikipedia, 2024en.wikipedia.org