Perceptions and performances of experienced incident commanders

Rescue operations have been organized in accordance with strict hierarchical management structures for decades. There seem to be minor differences between emergency response units within and between countries with respect to formalized routines and command structure. This presupposes that the incident commander is important for the emergency response performance and the actual outcome of the crisis. This paper presents findings from a study carried out in Norway, Sweden and Bosnia-Herzegovina, designed to reveal the assessments carried out by incident commanders and other professional leaders of emergency response units, the police, paramedics and fire brigade. The study encompasses aspects of naturalistic decision making in the different accident response phases. On call-out, the leaders constructed their mental maps of the situations from a combination of information from the call center, knowledge of standard procedures, their expectation of available resources and personal knowledge of the site. Typical management strategies involved incremental problem solving within narrow time horizons. The incident commanders were more concerned with details than with evaluating the overall situation. In general, the commanders expected normal situations, i.e. typical accidents they were trained to cope with and in response to which their preparations and strategies were standard. Our study shows that these incident command strategies are more reactive than proactive, and that the commanders rarely command. Risk management is limited to evaluations of the response units' safety.