No, I was a good IC, if I do say so myself.
It's that NIMS assumes that I have 10 other people who have administrative skills to be my "scribe" or "planning section" or "logistics section" when in reality, the majority of the people I had were evacuating people, getting pumps set up, directing traffic, preparing food for the volunteers, and later pumping out buildings and loading and unloading relief supplies.
In short, the concept of "span of control" is great - on paper.
But let's use my situation - a river flood in a town of 2,400 people.
I had an operational pool of, say 50 people, 25 firefighters, all of which have NIMS basic training, 2 Medics, one cop, and the rest community members with no particular training in NIMS.
Now, let's say I followed NIMS "span of control" guidelines - that would give me, say 5 people in my command staff.
Now that reduces my pool of labor to 45.
But those 5 people would not be operational command staff, and I'd need to staff those positions, so let's take another 5 people out and put them in the office. Now I'm down to 40.
But of those 40, all are volunteers, most aren't trained in NIMS and now I'm supposed to be documenting everything on some form or another as they pump out basements, scrape mud and so on. So I find three people who can handle reports. Now I have 37 people actually working.
One gets hurt, now I have my two medics tied up and there's another report...soon I have 34 people actually working, and at this point, I'm starting to see almost 1/3 of my resource pool doing administration.
Meanwhile, I send a "strike force" to rescue the walrus family that's living on the shores of the Delaware....
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