(College Station)—Texas Forest Service conducted the state’s first all-hazard incident management team (IMT) course the week of Jan. 6-12 at the El Tropicano Hotel on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. The national course was funded through the Office of Homeland Security in conjunction with the Governor’s Division of Emergency Management.
Members of emergency response entities from Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Abilene, Midland/Odessa and the Amarillo/Lubbock area attended. The course is in support of Governor Perry’s Executive Order-RP57, which requires the establishment of eight regional incident management teams.
“All incidents start and end at the local level,” said Mark Stanford, chief of fire operations for Texas Forest Service. “This course helped prepare the local incident managers in the case of a local emergency, as well as a national event.”
The course was designed to teach the basic principles of managing a response to a disaster, using an interdisciplinary team. The IMTs are strengthened in that they are bringing together law enforcement officers, firefighters, emergency medical personnel and emergency management coordinators.
“We took the class through different scenarios, such as tornados and floods,
building piece by piece each individual response within the command and
general staff,” said Bob Koenig, incident management team coordinator for
Texas Forest Service. “At the end of the week, we had all positions simultaneously
acting within their roles to manage the incident.” 