By Ashley N. Engler
The fire service prizes decisive action. We train for speed: fast size-ups, aggressive interior attacks, the confidence to push forward when information is incomplete. That instinct serves us well on most calls.
But it can also become a blind spot. The most consequential decision many company officers will make is not a tactical one; it is recognizing, in the first few minutes, that the incident in front of them has stopped being a fire, a rescue or a technical problem and has become something else entirely — a coordination problem.
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Complex incidents rarely announce themselves at dispatch. They build gradually, through competing priorities, expanding resource needs, changing hazards and growing demands on the command system, until the officer who arrived first realizes the incident has outgrown the organization built to handle it. That officer is almost never a specialist. On the incidents large enough to eventually require urban search and rescue teams, the first-arriving officer’s most important job is building the command architecture for the incoming USAR task force.
Complexity is not about size
One of the most persistent misconceptions in emergency response is that complex equals many resources. However, we know from experience that a three-engine structure fire can be more complex than a 10-company incident if it involves a threatened collapse, overlapping jurisdictions, disrupted critical infrastructure, conflicting information and/or hazards that are still evolving. Complexity comes from how variables interact, not how many personnel are standing on scene.
FEMA’s National Incident Management System (NIMS) Incident Complexity Guide captures this well. As incidents move along the continuum from Type 5, a single resource handled within one operational period, to Type 1, the most complex and often catastrophic events, the defining challenge shifts. It becomes less about tactics and more about coordination, information management, resource sustainment and organizational structure.
For the company officer, the practical task is learning to read the early signals that an incident is outgrowing its original response model. Those signals include:
- Resource requests arriving before assigned tasks are even finished;
- Several critical priorities competing for the same people and equipment;
- Span of control becoming difficult to hold;
- A need for specialized capability, such as USAR, hazmat or technical rescue;
- Expanding involvement from partner agencies and jurisdictions; and
- Situational awareness that is visibly degrading rather than improving.
In July 2025, a flash flood on the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas, showed how quickly this can happen: In the middle of the night, the river rose from a normal level to catastrophic flood stage in roughly 45 minutes, catching riverside camps, RV parks and homes off guard. There was no gradual buildup and no extra time to think. The complexity call had to be made with minutes of warning, not hours.
The incident often outgrows the command structure before it runs out of personnel. Recognizing that reality early is one of the most important leadership skills an officer can develop.
The first-arriving officer starts the system
Before any specialized team deploys, before an incident management team activates and before unified command forms, someone has already begun shaping the operation. In nearly every case, that person is a local company officer.
The 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, shows how much weight that first report carries. A 12-story oceanfront condominium partially collapsed without warning. What is remembered from the first radio report is its plain language: “The building is gone.” That single line, from a local officer who had no way of knowing the true scale of the collapse, set in motion the process that would eventually bring FEMA USAR task forces to the site. Size-up language matters because it is the language the rest of the system, including a specialized team still hours away, will build on.
The first-arriving officer establishes command, conducts the initial risk assessment, identifies hazards, begins accountability and determines whether additional resources are needed. Those actions form the foundation every later decision is built on. The officer does not have to solve the disaster. The officer has to start the system that can solve the disaster.
When officers see themselves only as tactical supervisors, they focus on crew assignments and immediate tasks. When they think as systems leaders, they focus on the structure, information flow and coordination that sustained operations will need. The question shifts from “What crew goes where?” to “What organization will this incident require two hours from now?”
More than just reinforcements
Before we go further, it’s worth being precise about the exact role of a FEMA USAR task force. A USAR task force, or a state or regional equivalent, is a highly technical, credentialed unit built around structural collapse specialists, canine search teams, physicians and paramedics, hazmat technicians, structural engineers, and heavy rigging and breaching specialists, supported by their own logistics and planning sections. These are not generalist reinforcements. They are typed resources who are trained and equipped for collapse and confined-space environments that go well beyond what an engine or truck company is built to handle. Ordering a USAR task force is a request for a specific capability, not just a request for more bodies.
A task force is activated through the state emergency management agency, often the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) or a direct FEMA order, and even a team that activates within hours of notification still has to muster a personnel roster, load an equipment cache that can run past 60,000 pounds and travel. Depending on distance, a realistic arrival on scene is measured in many hours, and sometimes more than a day, after the first 9-1-1 call. For that entire window, the incident belongs to the first-arriving officer, the local department and whatever mutual aid is close enough to help.
That’s the real relationship between the first-arriving officer and USAR, and it’s easy to get it backward. The officer is not a task force, and running a structure fire, a partial collapse or a flood rescue well does not require USAR-level technical rescue skill. What it requires is the same discipline that lets a 40-person national task force function for weeks: a clear command structure, accurate information, resources requested by capability and a plan that survives contact with changing conditions.
What watching USAR operate teaches every company officer
1. Build the organization before you need it: One of the most common failures during an escalating incident is waiting too long to expand the command structure. As workload increases, command should deliberately activate functions, stand up divisions or groups, establish staging, formalize accountability, and build planning capability before those needs become overwhelming. When expansion lags behind complexity, information starts bypassing command, situational awareness degrades, accountability weakens and decisions become reactive instead of deliberate.
Example: The EF4 tornado that tracked more than 165 miles overnight through Mayfield, Kentucky, in 2021 leveled the downtown area and destroyed a candle factory with roughly 110 workers inside. Crews built a mass-casualty medical branch at the factory site and ran extended responder rehabilitation through freezing overnight temperatures across a multi-day search. The cold-weather rehab cycles were as much a life safety decision for the crews as the search itself was for the workers trapped inside. Sustainment is a command function.
2. Request capability, not just resources: This is exactly how the USAR system itself is ordered: Task forces are requested as typed, mission-ready capability packages through the state and FEMA system, not as generic reinforcements. Company officers can borrow that same discipline at any scale long before a request ever reaches that level. The goal is not simply to acquire more personnel or equipment; it is to obtain the specific capability required to solve the problem in front of you. Asking for “more units” is often far less effective than identifying the actual capability gap, whether that is swiftwater rescue, heavy rigging or a specific medical asset, and requesting the resource that closes it.
3. More resources create more complexity: Every incoming resource brings its own accountability, communications, supervision, logistics and sustainment requirements. History is full of examples where incident performance suffered not because too few resources arrived, but because too many arrived before the command structure was prepared to manage them. Resources only become capability once they are organized, assigned, tracked and sustained.
Example: As Hurricane Harvey’s floodwaters knocked out power and backup refrigeration at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, in August 2017, volatile organic peroxides began decomposing and igniting. A hazmat emergency coupled with a catastrophic flood response forced coordination across fire, emergency management, hazmat and public health, with a mile-and-a-half evacuation layered on an already active flood-rescue operation.
Complex incidents rarely stay confined to a single hazard. Command must be built to absorb the incident inside the incident without losing the original mission.
4. A common operating picture wins incidents: Effective incident management depends on everyone working from the same understanding of reality. As complexity increases, more agencies arrive with different perspectives, priorities and information streams. Fire departments, EMS, emergency management, hospitals, utilities, law enforcement and public health partners frequently view the same incident through entirely different lenses, and the command structure must provide a mechanism for pulling those views into one shared picture. This is not an administrative nicety; shared situational awareness directly shapes responder safety, resource allocation, operational efficiency and public trust.
Example: The Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023 showed how consequential the earliest decisions in a common operating picture can be. Thirty-eight cars derailed, and several tank cars carrying vinyl chloride and other chemicals were compromised, prompting a roughly one-mile evacuation and a controlled vent-and-burn. EPA and state health agencies launched air and water monitoring, and the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry ran household health surveys for months afterward. The evacuate-versus-shelter decision and the vent-and-burn call, both made in the first hours, shaped public health consequences that outlasted the fire itself by months. A tank-car fire is a fire. A compromised tank car near a community is a public health incident with a fire inside it, and the command system has to see it that way from the start.
Looking beyond the first operational period
Perhaps the most important lesson complex incidents teach is that conditions change faster than assumptions do. Successful officers build a disciplined decision rhythm and run it continuously:
- Observe current conditions, hazard changes and resource status;
- Orient that information against objectives, risk and community priorities;
- Decide on priorities, assignments and resource moves that can be defended;
- Act by communicating clear objectives through the command structure; and
- Reassess before the original assumptions become dangerous.
The dangerous assumption is always the same one: that tomorrow’s conditions will resemble today’s. In collapse incidents, flood operations and large-scale disasters, changing hazards, deteriorating infrastructure, responder fatigue, shifting priorities and emerging community impacts continually reshape the operational environment, and the command system must evolve with it.
This is where public health enters the picture, not as a separate mission but as one of the clearest indicators that conditions are changing. Responder rehabilitation, healthcare continuity, vulnerable populations, shelter conditions and infrastructure disruptions all influence command decisions as incidents stretch across multiple operational periods. Medically fragile residents, people dependent on electricity or oxygen, and those with limited mobility may need evacuation support before anyone else. Dialysis centers, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies and long-term care facilities can become incident priorities in their own right. A flood, earthquake or collapse can sever access to transportation, medication, potable water and sanitation in the same afternoon it destroys a building. Asking what community functions must be protected to prevent secondary harm is a key part of the mission.
A practical filter for high-stakes decisions
Officers do not need a new framework for every incident, but a short set of questions, run consistently, can cut through complexity when the data is incomplete and the clock is running:
- Who is at greatest immediate risk? This defines life safety.
- What conditions threaten crews? This defines responder safety.
- What systems or populations are most vulnerable? This defines community health.
- What can current resources actually accomplish? This defines operational feasibility.
- What will the incident become in two, six, 12 and 24 hours? This defines scalability.
- What gets delayed if resources commit here? This defines the resource consequence — the opportunity cost that every allocation decision carries whether or not it is spoken out loud. For example, sending boats to one subdivision may delay evacuating a healthcare facility. Naming them, documenting them and being willing to defend them is what separates command judgment from guesswork.
The officer sets the trajectory
Complex incidents are managed successfully because a company officer recognized complexity early, communicated the problem clearly and built a scalable command system before the incident outran it. The first-arriving officer sets the trajectory. The radio report matters. The first resource request matters. The initial command structure matters. Most of all, the recognition that today’s incident may become tomorrow’s complex operation matters because it helps buy time until mutual aid, incident management teams and specialized capability can arrive.
The fire service has no shortage of tactical expertise. The next challenge is making sure company officers are prepared not just to manage the first five minutes of an incident, but to build the command system that can carry the next five operational periods. That is where complexity is won or lost, and it starts with the company officer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ashley N. Engler, MS, NRP, is a fire captain with Lincoln (Nebraska) Fire & Rescue and a nationally recognized leader in incident management and the DHS/FEMA Urban Search & Rescue (USAR) system. She serves as program manager and task force representative for FEMA USAR Nebraska Task Force One, as an incident support team liaison officer within the FEMA National Response System and as an all-hazards operations section chief and all-hazards incident commander for the Nebraska State Incident Management Assistance Team, with several years of local, state and nationally known deployments. A certified rescue technician and water rescue specialist, Engler has contributed to the IFSTA Rope Rescue Technician 1st Edition manual, is a FEMA USAR structural collapse instructor, and serves on the UL Fire Safety Research Institute Technical Panel for Multi-Story Structures. Engler also serves on the IAFC Company Officer Section Board as the secretary. She represents Nebraska as the ESF-9 search and rescue coordinator, is a military veteran who deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in emergency management.
