Emergency Preparedness

Appendix P EOC ACTIVATION

Unified Command

 The Unified Command organization consists of the Incident Commanders from the various jurisdictions or agencies operating together to form a single command structure. Overview Unified Command is an important element in multijurisdictional or multiagency domestic incident management. It provides guidelines to enable agencies with different legal, geographic, and functional responsibilities to coordinate, plan, and interact effectively. As a team effort, Unified Command overcomes much of the inefficiency and duplication of effort that can occur when agencies from different functional and geographic jurisdictions, or agencies at different levels of government, operate without a common system or organizational framework. All agencies with jurisdictional authority or functional responsibility for any or all aspects of an incident participate in the Unified Command structure and contribute to the following process and responsibilities:  Determining overall incident strategies.  Selecting objectives.  Ensuring that joint planning for tactical activities is accomplished in accordance with approved incident objectives.  Ensuring the integration of tactical operations.  Approving, committing, and making optimal use of all assigned resources. The exact composition of the Unified Command structure will depend on the location(s) of the incident (i.e., which geographical administrative jurisdictions are involved) and the type of incident (i.e., which functional agencies of the involved jurisdiction(s) are required). In the case of some multijurisdictional incidents, the designation of a single Incident Commander may be considered to promote greater unity of effort and efficiency.

May 2008

Incident Command System Training

Page 17