Local Government

Mutual Aid

Communities apply NIMS principles to integrate response plans and resources across jurisdictions, departments, the private sector, and NGOs. Various public and private mutual aid systems can be leveraged. Neighboring communities or organizations play a key role by providing support through a network of mutual aid and assistance agreements that identify the resources that communities may share during an incident. Additionally, private sector organizations often establish mutual aid agreements with each other to increase capabilities and expedite their response. The ability to provide mutual aid accurately and rapidly is critical during disasters, but mutual aid partners require a common language and process to support the sharing of qualified personnel. The National Qualification System (NQS) addresses this challenge by providing a common language and approach for qualifying, certifying, and credentialing incident management and support personnel. NQS provides the tools for jurisdictions and organizations to share resources seamlessly. Using the NQS approach helps to ensure personnel deploying through mutual aid agreements and compacts have the required capabilities to perform their assigned duties.17

Core Capabilities

Each mission area—prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery—identifies core capabilities required to address common threats and hazards. Using the core capabilities construct enables communities and organizations to focus on specific preparedness measures necessary to ensure that the capabilities are available when needed. By allowing communities and organizations to quantify response requirements and measure response capacity, core capabilities are the key performance management tool in emergency preparedness.18 The National Preparedness Goal describes the core capabilities necessary to be prepared for all threats and hazards. The core capabilities provide a common vocabulary describing the significant functions that must be maintained and executed across the whole community to achieve the goal of a “secure and resilient nation.”

Prevention: Avoiding, preventing, or stopping a threatened or actual act of terrorism. Within the context of national preparedness, the term “prevention” refers to dealing with imminent threats. Protection: Securing the homeland against acts of terrorism and human-caused or natural disasters. Mitigation: Reducing loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters. Response: Saving lives, stabilizing community lifelines, protecting property and the environment, and meeting basic human needs after an incident has occurred. Recovery: Assisting impacted communities with restoration and revitalization.

The response core capabilities are the activities that generally must be accomplished in incident response, regardless of which levels of government are involved. While core capabilities are organized by mission area, they do not operate exclusively within that mission area. Actions related to one core capability often can inform actions associated with another.

17 For more information on NQS, see https://www.fema.gov/national-qualification-system; for more information on NQS typing tools, see https://rtlt.preptoolkit.fema.gov/Public/Combined. 18 For a full list of the core capabilities, see https://www.fema.gov/core-capabilities.