Disaster responseSoutheastern European nations are latest to adopt emergency-response system
The Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS), developed nearly a decade ago by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), is used today around the world for emergency response. Lincoln Laboratory, in partnership with NATO, is modifying the system, and in its latest development, NICS has been implemented in the southeastern European nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro.
On a Google map of Modrac Lake, located near the city of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, icons in the shape of boats move across the water. A commander, looking at the map on a monitor, watches their progress. Each boat in real life holds a disaster response unit that is heading toward the site of a disaster — in this case, a chemical spill. The same interface that provides the map also shows images from the scene, messages between responders, social media posts from observers, and other real-time information that the commander uses to direct people and resources. The interface is one big picture, created and viewed by everyone involved, of the scene as it unfolds.
The platform enabling this coordination is called the Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS). NICS, developed nearly a decade ago by Lincoln Laboratory and the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), is used today around the world for emergency response. In its latest development, NICS has been implemented in the southeastern European nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Through a four-year partnership with the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme, Lincoln Laboratory and DHS S&T will work with local and federal response agencies in these countries to adapt and enhance NICS for the specific needs of this multinational community.
“We are working with each country to best decide how NICS can be adapted to meet their disaster-response needs and also how NICS can improve communication across country borders,” says Stephanie Foster, a staff member in the Laboratory’s Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group and the program manager for the NICS NATO project. Foster notes that NICS will help the countries build a standardized method of response to large-scale disasters, such as the cyclone and ensuing floods that devastated the region in 2014.
Modifications to NICS are building on what staff learned during the NATO Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre’s 17th Consequence Management Field Exercise between Sept. 24 and 29 in 2017. Close to 1,300 disaster-response personnel from 34 NATO member and partner nations participated in the exercise.
