[jcrawfordor]

Ships nearby responding to a distress call is a matter of expedience rather than good planning - something is better than nothing. But typically once an organization like a coast guard gets involved, they start giving orders to other responding ships, including sending ships away if they aren't needed and adding to the fray. This general concept is called incident command or the incident command system (ICS) after a set of practices that I think originated in firefighting but are now broadly taught by FEMA to all sorts of disaster responders. Basically that there needs to be someone in charge of the incident and there need to be standardized and controlled flows of information, otherwise it's very easy for the response to be ineffective and even dangerous because of poor communications, miscoordination, etc.

[schoen]

Thanks! I studied ICS as part of a neighborhood emergency response training some years ago, but I don't feel that familiar with it anymore.

So I guess the basic idea is that volunteers should provide aid as they can, but once a response coordination authority is established, the volunteers should either leave the scene or put themselves under that authority's direction? (Including potentially being directed to leave the scene.)

[brianpan]

ICS is also how we handle software outage response (aka on-call). And yes, it originated from firefighting response.

https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res...