Step by Step Incident Administration

There are various help articles for each step of this process, but these are the overview steps for administering an incident:

Initial Firefighter (Incident Command) Steps

• An Incident (Incident Report) is either entered by Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) or manually.
• Incident Command (with input from Operations, and on scene firefighters) updates:
• Check the Incident Category, ensure it is correct.
• Complete the Incident Narrative with good detail on department actions taken and situation mitigations.
• Ensure attendance is correct and complete.
• Ensure the roles played, apparatus utilized and agencies involved are complete & correct.
• Once updated, the incident state (placeholder from CAD) is "preliminary".

Administration Steps

• Review an incident for correctness and completeness:
  • Check details of the report (ensuring the various)
  • Mark this incident as incident state complete.
• Process an incident for NFIRS:
• Complete any additional incident NFIRS elements; e.g. Property Use.
• Mark this incident as incident NFIRS state NFIRS ready.
• Export a batch incidents (e.g. a month's worth) to NFIRS:
• Timing is typically based upon your state / territory's requirements.
• Once exported, the incident NFIRS state becomes exported.

Incident Steps - What / When

Firefighters should complete their preliminary incident report after the incident, or (perhaps if middle of the night) the next day. Do not wait too long after the incident, so collective memories are fresh, and reports are higher quality.

Administrators can review incidents at any time, but doing it no less than once a week (or maybe a day or so after the incident has terminated) allows for updates with fresh memories.

Reviewing for NFIRS can occur later, perhaps once a month, in part because the incident review should contain all the details without needing to rely upon memory, and some details might come from a fire investigators report.

Additional Incident Actions

If an incident report document is required, for example to be sent to insurance companies or for printing for the station, a portable document format (PDF) can be generated.

If incident report number crunching is required, incident reports can be run by timeframe. perhaps with groups by incident category and/or values tallied by hours of response, e.g. incident response times, attendance by member.

If other incident data processing is required, incidents can be exported and downloaded to a spreadsheet for custom analysis.