Emergency Incident Management Systems. Louis N. Molino, Sr.
when they entered and/or left the area. An overarching control that set priorities or priority areas was not initiated, and accountability was lacking. Responders and hospital staff were contaminated and suffered injury, partially because of a lack of control at the incident. On the other hand, Oklahoma City did not micromanage the response, but they controlled nearly every aspect of it.
2.5.3 Cooperation
Cooperation is the process of working together to accomplish a mutual goal. Cooperation requires active participation and a unity between responding agencies and entities. It creates a synergy whereby a communal effort is put forward to provide the best possible response to an incident. Cooperation is working with outside agencies in an effort to make the agency more capable of completing a task. They essentially work on the same project rather than competing against each other.
As has been stated many times, cooperation in the Tokyo sarin attack was seriously lacking. To accomplish cooperation with other agencies and entities, there must first be an open line of communication and a willingness to work together. In Tokyo, the needed cooperation and communication was nonexistent. This led to and helped to create an extremely hectic and chaotic response. Looking at the big picture, the lack of cooperation and communication led to more confusion and uncertainty about what had happened (Murakami, 2000).
Because there was not any utilization of a full‐encompassing IMS method, the response was a hodgepodge of (multiple) commanders from varying levels of government, each working toward their own goals. Even when command centers were in place, there was inefficiency, ineptitude, and ineffectiveness because of poor unit assignments that did not take advantage of each group's specialized training. Additionally, the multiple commands centers did not employ information sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and coordination, even after it was realized that it was one incident spread out over a large area.
These actions in the Tokyo incident were problematic, especially considering that a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and/or Explosive (CBRNE) incident requires a mix of specialized responders. Often, specific specialized responders are needed to mitigate the agent or agents and prevent the spread of those agents to uncontaminated areas. Of course, to effectively undertake such an effort, police or some type of security force are needed to secure the area (and eventually investigate), firefighters are often needed to extricate victims and decontaminate them before letting them go or transferring them to a hospital, EMS (sometimes along with firefighters) are needed to administer prehospital care, and hospitals are needed to treat patients.
Murakami (2000) states that the death and injury toll could have been greatly reduced if the management of the incident did not have such a lethargic approach by the Tokyo government. Pangi (2002) first identified that there was no planning for such an event, and specialized training Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, or Explosive (CBRNE) response was nonexistent at any level of government except for the military.
Information sharing was another issue. Because there was no coordination through information sharing between government entities, and relatively little information sharing between disciplines, the scope of the incident was not realized for over an hour after the attacks began. From the onset until the connection was made, each location that sarin was released was treated (by first responders) as separate incidents. According to Murakami's (2000), after completing interviews with a multitude of first responders and victims, it was found that each level of government worked independent of each other. In some instances, responders from the same level of government did not work in cooperation with their counterparts at the same level. Murakami's (2000) report stated, “There is no clear‐cut chain of command… The effort of local units were extraordinary but the overall emergency network was useless” (p. 193). He went on to say that there needed to be more integration of resources.
In Oklahoma City, cooperation was a predominant factor in having such a successful response. From the onset of the incident, numerous agencies placed their mobile command centers next to the fire departments mobile command center. While each agency had tasks related to their discipline in public safety, they cooperated and collaborated with each other to ensure that nothing was missed, and they reduced duplication of efforts. Resources from nongovernmental organizations, including nonprofits, businesses, and organizations, local governments, state governments, and the federal government cooperated to ensure a holistic response and recovery. Whenever a gap was identified, many times an agency who was qualified to fill that gap would cooperate and offer to undertake the task (ODCEM, n.d.). This led to an all‐encompassing approach that provided a superior process that sped the response and recovery process.
2.5.4 Collaboration
While collaboration is similar to cooperating, it is very different at the same time. Collaboration is the act of uniting with another agency (or agencies) in which they are not immediately connected with. Rather than being a helping hand to another agency, they become a stakeholder in successfully mitigating and ending the incident while working together to create the best possible outcome.
Collaboration, in an incident management sense, is more related to working together, sharing ideas, helping identify resources, and helping to plan the recovery and response to an incident. This is a synchronized and coordinated activity in which different agencies and disciplines continuously work side‐by‐side to develop and sustain the solution for the problem. It can be described as an orchestra with many different instruments coming together for the benefit of the end result.
In the Tokyo sarin attack, there was no collaboration. According to reports, those involved with this incident did not even take other agencies into consideration. Rather than working side‐by‐side, each agency worked independently of the others. As multiple people began to make their way to the subway platform and collapse or sit down waiting for help, only the EMS agency responded to those patients. Law enforcement did not help secure the perimeter, which led to more secondary contaminations. Approximately an hour after the incident started, a news crew took patients to a more distant hospital, they learned that the hospital had not been informed of the incident, and they did not even have a doctor available; they had to summon a doctor to treat these patients. Furthermore, the hospitals did not collaborate, so one hospital was severely overwhelmed while other hospitals saw few patients, or no patients at all (Murakami, 2000).
Essentially, all government levels were operating with little to no cooperation and collaboration between agencies. While it may sound as if this text is repeating itself, you cannot change the facts. Each individual agency did what they thought was best for their small portion of the overall incident, and they did not even consider what might be going on at other areas of the incident or with other agencies. Not only did the responding agencies work independently of each other, but they essentially worked in competition against other agencies. In one report by Pangi (2002), it was found that information was not shared for quite a long time; in one instance related to this attack, information was intentionally withheld for several months. Documentation found by Pangi (2002) revealed that the Self Defense Force (SDF) was still unwilling to share information about the attack with local police for several months, which played a role in slowing the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators (Pangi, 2002).
Due to the lack of coordination in the Tokyo subway incident, one subway train was allowed to run the entire scheduled route to completion, and then begin the route again with the sarin puddle still on the train. Some commuters affected by the gas laid on the floor for over an hour before a passerby jumped into action (Murakami, 2000). While some of the issues can be blamed on the Japanese culture, it is ultimately first responder's that need to work together, even if it is different than what is normal in their culture.
In Oklahoma City, a collaborative effort was begun almost immediately. At the bombing site, first responders from multiple disciplines worked shoulder to shoulder meeting the needs of the incident. Local resources quickly began to create a unified front of how to best overcome the difficulties they were facing. From the onset, there was no competition between local agencies. They worked together to create the best possible outcome, even though the end of the incident would not be seen for over a month. As was mentioned previously, local and state agencies placed