One overlooked advantage of a system like NIMS became apparent to me during my Red Cross deployment to Katrina. Our normal rotation was 21 days. So around day 21, everybody that was in the original group is replaced with "newbies".

It became obvious that if logs, journals etc. were written by someone not using standard language, they became almost useless. And without history, the "newbie" was prone to repeat old mistakes and create protocols that were already in existence.

All those quirky little things that the prior group had learned from experience had to be re-learned because they were not documented in a clear, common language.

Nomad.