[MRIC] More Thoughts on The ICS-213

[Pat Scolla]

I must chime in here and agree with Jim from Frederick County on the 
need to have a form, ideal or not, that is accepted by pretty much all 
the agencies that we as RACES personnel might encounter during a real 
incident.  In Harford County alone, we are looking at dealing with 
responders from Harford County, other county and state agencies in 
Maryland, responders from various Pennsylvania jurisdictions, Federal 
jurisdictions both civil and military, relief personnel from other areas 
of the United States, personnel from all over the United States coming 
in for the Red Cross and Salvation Army, etc.  Hence, it behooves us to 
remember that we could well be dealing with a great many different 
agencies if we were to experience a large scale incident such as 
Hurricane Katrina or another domestic terrorism incident.

Also, in developing this "Universal Message Form", we need to remember 
either the KISS principle or the MISS principle - Keep It Short & Simple 
or Make It Short & Simple.

The more we try and and unnecessary complexities such as word count the 
chance of fouling something up big time increases exponentially.  If one 
looks at the ICS-213 carefully enough, one will see that each ICS-213 
will have it's own unique Message Number that is made up of two items - 
 From (line 4) and Number (line 6).   For example there may be 6 
message  Number 12s received by a RACES Operator at Central Command, but 
only one of those twelve will be from Location XYZ.  Hence that message 
number will be XYZ-12.

Someone else commented on not being able to record the messages as they 
come in.  I ask why not?  We have a tape recorder that is ready for use 
in the Harford County RACES Room that can be used to record either the 
entire event or specific messages.  We do so in order to go back and 
review what happened a few weeks post activation in order to see what we 
did right and what we can do better in the future.  A decent tape 
recorder, a DC adapter and some cassette tapes can be purchased at Radio 
Shack for under $100 and is well worth the investment!

Finally, if anyone would take the time to look back at the ICS-213 form 
that was on the RACES Materials CD that AJ3X and I handed out ito all 
that attended n November 2006 at the RACES Officers get together and 
then again to all at the first MRIC meeting, people will see that the 
"MEMA ICS-213" form that Al, W3YRS, has distributed is for all practical 
purposes, the identical form that has been in use by the  Baltimore and 
Harford County RACES Groups for 2 years now.  All I can see that AL 
really did was to remove some wording and add the RACES logo.

73,
Pat, wb0egr
Harford County RO & EC