AMU Emergency Management Health & Fitness Opinion Public Safety Resource

The EOC: What Is This Mystical Place?

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Many emergency service personnel have heard of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), but what is this mystic place and what does it do? 

Many think that the EOC is a place that has many computers and solves all of the disaster coordination issues. However, this could be farthest from the truth. The EOC is the facility that holds the Multi-Agency Coordination (MAC) Group. 

While there are advantages to the technology in the EOC, it is the people, procedures, and organizational collaboration make the EOC and the MAC work flawlessly.

Multi-Agency Coordination Group (MAC)

As many may have learned in FEMA’s [link url=”https://training.fema.gov/emicourses/crsdetail.aspx?cid=E400&ctype=R” title=”ICS 400 course”], the MAC is the group of individuals that work at a policy and coordination level to facilitate processes, resources, and financial backing to fulfill the needs of the disaster response.

While the incident commander can do a great job of establishing a planning section to gather information and develop a plan, and of establishing a logistics section to obtain resources to meet the needs of the plan and have a finance section that can track and pay for the resources and equipment, he/she may only have a perspective of what is happening at his/her event.

The MAC has representatives from various levels of government and entities within each level that have authority to speak for their organization, provide resources and funding, and can collect data to make the needed declarations of disaster to obtain resources from the next level of government.

The EOC, A Facility

The EOC is the facility that the coordination takes place within. Within the EOC are telephones, computers, and boards to collect and disseminate information. When workers show up at the EOC, they must understand the layout and configuration of the facility and additionally understand the different functions at the EOC, which can differ at the various levels of government. 

At the local level, responsibilities of area command and MAC often overlap, as there may not be a good facility beyond the EOC in which to establish and carry out the duties of the area command. 

In Part 2 of this series, we will discuss the arrangements of the EOC’s in more detail and compare/contrast these configurations. We will cover the Area Command and EOC similarities and differences, as well as discuss different configurations of the EOC.

I hope that the EOC will no longer be a mystical place.

Dr. Randall Hanifen serves as a shift commander at a medium-sized suburban fire department in the northern part of the Cincinnati area. Randall is the CEO/principal consultant of an emergency services consulting firm, providing analysis and solutions related to organizational structuring of fire and EMS organizations. He is the chairperson and operations manager for a county technical rescue team. From a state and national perspective, he serves as a taskforce leader for one of FEMA's urban search and rescue teams, which responds to presidential declared disasters. From an academic standpoint, Randall has a bachelor’s degree in fire administration, a master’s degree in executive fire service leadership, and a doctoral degree in business administration with a specialization in homeland security. He is the associate author of “Disaster Planning and Control” (Penwell, 2009), which provides first responders with guidance through all types of disasters.

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