OR&R Helps Teach Incident Command System (ICS) Class in Cameroon

During the week of September 3-7, 2007, OR&R's Emergency Response Division (ERD) sent a member to Douala, Cameroon, West Africa to co-teach a class on Incident Command System (ICS) to 30 students from the governments of Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, as well as some non-governmental agencies from this region of the continent. The U.S. Forest Service sponsored the initiative and invited NOAA and the U.S. Coast Guard to instruct on the basic and intermediate elements of ICS. Attendees represented the executive level of many ministries, including the Cameroonian Navy, municipal fire departments, mining, civil defense, and public health ministries. Capping off the class was an oil spill exercise that showcased the General NOAA Operational Modeling Environment (GNOME) program developed in ERD.

The students eagerly asked for more background on ICS, joint contingency planning, and spill modeling; many wanted their superiors to learn ICS, as well, in order to implement the system on a larger scale. Since the initial planning for this mission in November 2006, a Kenya Airways jet crashed outside of Douala shortly after takeoff in May 2007, resulting in complete loss of life; this tragedy served as the backdrop for many of the discussions in class. After the course ended, the instructors arranged for a tour of the city morgue to inspect the process of victim identification that was still being conducted by a private firm four months later. While the tour was a grim conclusion to the week of training, it underscored the necessity of implementing a management system for handling complex incidents.