Where’s Waldo? Building an Incident Command System in Coney Island

In July 2017, I created and led a search-and-rescue exercise for New York City Emergency Management’s Community Emergency Response Team program.

Officially, it was called the 2017 Coney Island SAREX—a three-hour search-and-rescue exercise conducted within Brooklyn Community District 13. Its mission areas included communications, response, search and rescue, and, most importantly to me, the Incident Command System.

Unofficially, it became a very elaborate game of Where’s Waldo?

Learning ICS by Actually Doing It

The idea began with my desire to learn more about the Incident Command System and to help other CERT volunteers understand it.

ICS is something emergency-response volunteers study extensively. We take the FEMA courses, learn the terminology, pass the online tests and become familiar with concepts such as command structure, operational sections and span of control.

But studying ICS and functioning inside an actual Incident Command System are two very different things.

You can know the definitions. You can pass the exam. You can explain span of control in a classroom. That does not mean you understand what information must travel between Operations, Planning, Logistics and Command—or what happens when that information does not get where it needs to go.

I wanted CERT members to experience ICS as a working system rather than a diagram on a PowerPoint slide.

So we created an exercise.

The scenario called for Brooklyn CERT to deploy with mutual-aid assistance and search for a missing vulnerable adult during the height of the Coney Island tourist season. Participants would have to establish an incident command, organize field operations, communicate by radio and locate the missing person in a dense, crowded urban environment.

Casting Waldo

While I was developing the exercise, I talked about it with my family.

We needed someone to play the missing person, but there was a catch: it had to be someone the CERT members would not immediately recognize.

My stepfather Jan Christensen was an outsider to the program, which made him an obvious candidate. When he volunteered, the reaction was immediate: yes, perfect.

Jan used a walker in everyday life, and for the exercise he portrayed an older adult experiencing dementia. He was not simply hiding behind a building waiting to be discovered. He was given a personality and a purpose.

In Jan’s mind, he was looking for Woody Guthrie.

He wanted to wander farther down Coney Island toward the neighborhood associated with Guthrie and his family. The city, quite reasonably, required me to compress the operating area so the exercise could be completed safely and within the allotted time. Instead of embarking on an epic folk-music pilgrimage across Coney Island, Jan took a car service to the designated area, got out with his walker and spent the afternoon wandering around and enjoying himself.

He had a wonderful time playing the part.

Two Command Structures, Two Different Jobs

One distinction is important: I did not personally direct the search teams.

I was the lead exercise planner and ran the exercise itself. The actual simulated incident had its own command structure. Susan Flaschenberg, the Brooklyn 13 team chief, served as Incident Commander for the search operation.

That separation was deliberate.

My job was to make the exercise function: controllers, evaluators, safety, logistics, communications, staging, injects and overall exercise play. Susan’s job was to command the response to the simulated missing-person incident.

The official planning structure included Operations, Planning, Logistics, Communications, Medical, Safety, Administration and other support functions. The exercise plan named me as Lead Exercise Planner and identified Susan as the Incident Commander for the field operation.

In other words, we were not pretending to use ICS. We were using it.

Nearly One Hundred People in the Coney Island Heat

We had approximately one hundred people involved.

There were CERT volunteers, search teams, controllers, evaluators, communications personnel, logistical staff and medical support from the Bensonhurst Volunteer Ambulance Service. The Incident Command Post was established at the Brooklyn Community Board 13 office, while the staging area operated from the parking lot of Liberation Diploma Plus High School.

And it was hot.

Not pleasantly warm. Not “nice day at the beach” warm.

It was blisteringly hot—somewhere in the 90s—and safety became one of our most important real-world concerns. We emphasized hydration constantly. Water was available at the staging area, the command post and throughout the operation. People were reminded to drink and to watch one another for signs of heat-related illness.

That was part of the lesson, too. An exercise scenario may be simulated, but the heat is real. The crowds are real. The traffic is real. A twisted ankle, dehydration or medical emergency does not become fictional simply because everyone begins their radio transmissions with, “This is an exercise.”

The plan included a formal CODE RED procedure for any genuine emergency, and an ambulance was standing by throughout the operation.

Radios Were the Nervous System

The search teams coordinated through the city’s CERT radio system.

At the time, we were using city-issued digital radios operating through CERT’s licensed communications network. I do not remember the technical details well enough to say precisely what kind of digital system it was, and I will not pretend otherwise. What mattered operationally was that the radios connected the search teams with their command structure.

The formal communications plan established separate Operations, Command and Controller/Evaluator nets, along with backup tactical channels. Search teams reported through Operations rather than everybody attempting to talk directly to everybody else.

That is where ICS becomes more than a collection of boxes.

Communications is not merely handing someone a radio and saying, “Talk into this.”

It is deciding who talks to whom, what information they need to pass, where that information goes next and who is responsible for acting on it. A radio system can carry words. It cannot create an effective command structure by itself.

Finding Waldo

The search lasted about three hours.

Eventually, one of the teams approached Jan. He played up the confused-vulnerable-senior role convincingly, complete with his references to Woody Guthrie.

In a wonderful coincidence, one of the searchers was an Englishman from the Jersey City team who actually knew American folk music. He understood Jan’s references and realized what was going on.

They found Waldo.

The team confirmed his identity, and one of the ambulances standing by for the exercise was deployed to pick him up.

Jan and the Jersey City volunteer later became friends. That remains one of my favorite outcomes from the entire day: amid all the planning documents, command structures, radios and evaluation forms, two people connected over folk music.

That is the kind of thing no exercise planner can script.

The Lesson That Stayed With Me

The great lesson of the Coney Island SAREX was that ICS must be experienced.

You can take every FEMA course available. You can memorize the organizational chart. You can learn the titles and responsibilities. All of that is useful, but it remains abstract until people must organize themselves, establish command, manage resources, maintain span of control and move useful information through the system.

The exercise gave CERT volunteers the opportunity to inhabit those roles.

They had to form teams. They had to report through channels. They had to understand who was making which decisions. They had to coordinate field operations while accounting for heat, crowds, traffic, safety and the possibility of a real emergency occurring during the exercise.

That was what I wanted from the beginning.

The missing-person search gave us a scenario. Waldo gave us some fun. The radios gave us connectivity.

But ICS gave us the structure that allowed all those pieces to function together.

And somewhere in the middle of Coney Island, my stepfather wandered around with his walker looking for Woody Guthrie—while nearly one hundred people learned how an incident command system actually works.

That was the point.