Suchergebnisse

Current incident command research faces several challenges. The incident commander's behaviour and related assessments in the crisis response are context bound, and our understanding of these factors requires close awareness of the context. Reconstruction of the on‐scene behaviour encompassing situation awareness and cognitive reasoning is difficult. There is a need to develop better understanding of decision‐making in crisis settings and methods for rigorous observation and knowledge elicitation. In order to understand the importance and actual influence of incident commanding, the researchers need to assess the response in real time, not only based on studying logs etc. afterwards. Participatory action research provides ideas in which the researcher, besides being an observer, would be involved in the rescue work. This raises ethical questions, but there is a need for naturalistic decision‐making research to evolve beyond descriptive models.

In this article social and information network theory is used to study information flows through the incident command post in a large‐scale emergency operation. The case presented is the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway. The data were collected from evaluation reports, media and interviews with the incident, fire, medical and ambulance commanders. The article presents the incident command system in Norway and how this was used as a base for improvisation during the operation on initiative from rescue workers on scene. The main internal information flows in each separate rescue service were connected and coordinated at the incident command point through strong ties between the commanders. Important and novel information also reached the commanders through weak and informal ties to more peripheral actors.