Australasian Inter-Service Incident Management System

Main article: Incident Command System

In Australia, the Australasian Inter-Service Incident Management System (AIIMS) is the nationally recognised^{[citation needed]} system of organizational principles and structure used to manage wildfires and other large emergencies (eg. Floods, Storms and Cyclones etc) utilizing the All Agencies approach. Although AIIMS was originally an American idea that was introduced by the Australian fire authorities in the mid 1980s it has since been adopted by the various State Emergency Services and a number of other public safety organisations to be the standard in Australian emergency response.

AIIMS is an application of Incident Command System, which is claimed to be robust, scalable, and a widely applicable system for dealing with all manner of complex incidents and emergencies. It does this by having various 'sectors', 'divisions', and 'commanders' which can be expanded and contracted dependant on the size of the 'emergency'. Each area under the AIIMS structure is colour coded for ease of identification:

• Incident Controller - White
• Logistics - Blue
• Operations - Red
• Planning - Yellow

Furthermore following on from recent disasters and criticisms of Emergency Services (See: Black Saturday bushfires and current 'Flood Reviews') further areas have been added/promoted in light of the various 'recommendations'

• Intelligence
• Public Information

The way in which AIIMS is "scalable" is that it does not require the full scale response to every incident - it allows for the build up of resources and response activity. For example a single story house does not require a Incident Control Centre (ie. control room) with six people managing the incident, however the 2010–2011 Queensland floods obviously required all functional areas to be filled by a separate individual as other people filling the other roles which come under each functional area (eg. Welfare, Catering etc) as obviously a single person would not be able to handle the logistics/operations/planning etc all by themselves as would be expected of the single story fire (at least in the first instance).

This scalability is also demonstrated by AIIMS being used by other agencies such as List of Victorian government agencies where they state the use of the AIIMS system promotes effective joint operations through the use of common structures and terminology when they collaborate with other agencies using AIIMS to manage public land emergencies (eg. Floods & Fires etc).

Its uses also extended to the management of the locust plague where they used AIIMS to manage the incident. Although of course as with any system it is not without its criticisms, mainly stemming from when people should delegate (ie. scale the system) from a single incident controller to an IC plus Operations Officer or when to involve planning or as demonstrated by Black Saturday bushfires or the 2010–2011 Queensland floods who is responsible for intelligence, inter-service communication etc which the government hopes will/has been overcome by the promotion of Intelligence and Public Information although obviously only time will tell and with no major disasters since early 2011 the new system remains largely untested.

See also

• Emergency Management Australia