Incident Command: Tales From the Hot Seat presents a unique examination of the skills of the on-scene or incident commander who is in charge of an emergency or major incident. Experienced commanders from the police and fire services, the armed forces, civil aviation and the prison service give personal accounts of their command experiences, discuss their dilemmas and the pressures they faced, and reveal the demands of leading under extreme conditions. They share intimate details of cases where their command skills were tested, ranging from industrial fires, riots, hostage taking, warfare, peacekeeping, to in-flight emergencies. Each case ends with lessons learnt and tips for the developing commander. Additional chapters present expert accounts of the art of incident command, incident command systems, competencies for command, as well as reviews of the latest psychological research into decision making and team work under pressure. The book is an essential compelling text that captures the essence of incident command by analyzing command experiences across a range of professions.
About the Author: Kevin Arbuthnot is Deputy Chief Fire Officer of the West Yorkshire Fire Service. As Director of Operations he leads the team which devised and implemented the West Yorkshire Incident Command System. Subsequently, invited by the Home Office to join the 'Safe Person Concept' project, this was adapted into a command system for the whole UK fire service and published as a Fire Service Manual at the beginning of 1999. He is currently developing work in the area of assessment of competence to command. He lectures on incident command widely, including to the Brigade Command Course at the Fire Service College and is the lead officer on incident command issues for the Chief and Assistant Chief Fire Officers Association in the UK. Rhona Flin (BSc, PhD Psychology) is Professor of Applied Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She is a Chartered Psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She studied at Aberdeen University, worked there as a Research Fellow on eyewitness memory then spent eleven years lecturing in industrial psychology at Aberdeen Business School. For the last twelve years she has directed a team of psychologists working with high reliability industries (especially energy sector) on research and consultancy projects concerned with the management of safety and emergency response. The group are currently working on projects relating to aviation safety (funded by EC and CAA), leadership and safety in offshore management (funded by HSE and the oil industry), team skills and emergency management (funded by the nuclear industry), and anaesthetists' non-clinical skills (funded by SCPMDE). Her recent books include Incident Command: Tales from the Hot Seat (edited with Arbuthnot, Ashgate, in press); Sitting in the Hot Seat: Leaders and Teams for Critical Incident Management (Wiley, 1996), Managing the Offshore Installation Workforce (edited with Slaven, PennWell Books, 1996) and Decision Making under Stress (edited with Salas, Strub and Martin, Ashgate, 1997).