Control
10. Gaining and maintaining control
The purpose of an emergency response operation is to restore or-
der to a chaotic and disorderly situation. The intention should
be to affect the whole course of events on the basis of the goals
and intent of the emergency response organisation, where these
goals and intentions must, naturally, be based on both the assis-
tance need for the individual situation and the assistance need as
a whole. This is to say that the course of events at an incident site
must be steered in some way. If, for example, there is a fire and
a number of injuries at an incident site, the intention can be to
care for the injured and extinguish the fire. It is necessary to try
to envisage some kind of course – in thought and action – that re-
sults in the injured being cared for, the situation generally being
tackled and the course of events at the incident site following the
envisaged course.
One should reason in this way irrespective of the decision do-
main one belongs to. Weighing up and balancing must go on con-
tinually so that the course of events is steered and takes the desi-
red direction. For system command this can mean, for example,
that a balance has to be found between response operations, emer-
gency preparedness production, assistance need and risk situation
within the municipality, and a method found to, by applying re-
sources, effectively handle the situations that may arise due to the
risk situation. Emergency preparedness production involves, for
example, the transfer of resources or the increase or reduction of
a resource at a particular location.
Control
To clarify and describe the perceived development of the course
of events, we can use the term control. American literature uses
the term fire control to, among other things, describe a coordinated
operation consisting of the efforts made to protect people, property
and the environment from fire (Routley, 1991).