State, Tribal, Territorial, and Insular Area Managed Response

Introduction

The National Preparedness System outlines an organized process for the whole community3 to move forward with its preparedness activities and achieve the National Preparedness Goal. The National Response Framework (NRF) sets the strategy and doctrine for how the whole community builds, sustains, and delivers the response core capabilities identified in the National Preparedness Goal in an integrated manner with the other mission areas. The fourth edition of the NRF emphasizes enhancing the unity of effort between the government and the private sector through better coordination and collaboration.

Evolution of the Framework

The NRF builds on over 25 years of federal response guidance, beginning with the Federal Response Plan, published in 1992, and the National Response Plan, published in 2004. This fourth edition of the

NRF reorganizes and streamlines the previous version of the NRF, expands principles and concepts to better integrate government and private sector response efforts, and introduces the community lifelines concept and terminology.

This document supersedes the National Response Framework, Third Edition that was issued in June 2016 and becomes effective 60 days after publication.

Community lifelines are those services that enable the continuous operation of critical government and business functions and are essential to human health and safety or economic security. In serious but purely local incidents, interruptions of water service, electric power, and other community lifeline components are typically brief and easy to mitigate. However, severe and widespread incidents can halt lifeline services for many weeks or months. Such disruptions are especially extensive in catastrophic incidents and may result in mass casualties and other cascading consequences. Making community lifelines a core focus of incident response within the NRF offers unique benefits for incidents ranging from small-scale to catastrophic disasters. By building capabilities to stabilize4 and accelerate the restoration of community lifeline services, it will be possible to save countless lives, limit damage to the economy, help maintain essential services for critical national security installations, reduce the initial impacts of disasters, and facilitate recovery operations. While the primary focus of incident response remains on stabilizing communitylifelines, other secondary considerations regarding the natural and cultural environment and economic factors are equally as important.

3 Whole community includes individuals and communities, businesses, private and public sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, faith-based organizations, nonprofit organizations, and all levels of government (local, regional/metropolitan, state, tribal, territorial, insular area, and federal). Whole community is defined in the National Preparedness Goal as “a focus on enabling the participation in national preparedness activities of a wider range of players from the private sector, including nongovernmental organizations and the general public, in conjunction with the participation of all levels of governmental in order to foster better coordination and working relationships.” 4 Stabilization occurs when immediate threats to life and property are anticipated, resourced, and managed and basic community lifeline services are provided to survivors.