National Response Plan
The National Response Plan, last updated 25 May 2006, and under review since, established a comprehensive all-hazards approach to enhance the ability of the United States to manage domestic incidents. The plan incorporates best practices and procedures from incident management disciplines homeland security, emergency management, law enforcement, firefighting, public works, public health, responder and recovery worker health and safety, emergency medical services, and the private sector and integrates them into a unified system. It forms the basis of how the federal government coordinates with state, local, and tribal governments and the private sector during incidents. It establishes protocols to help
- Save lives and protect the health and safety of the public, responders, and recovery workers;
- Ensure security of the homeland;
- Prevent an imminent incident, including acts of terrorism, from occurring;
- Protect and restore critical infrastructure and key resources;
- Conduct law enforcement investigations to resolve the incident, apprehend the perpetrators, and collect and preserve evidence for prosecution and/or attribution;
- Protect property and mitigate damages and impacts to individuals, communities, and the environment; and
- Facilitate recovery of individuals, families, businesses, governments, and the environment
The NRP represents a true "national" framework in terms of both product and process. The NRP development process included extensive vetting and coordination with Federal, State, local, and tribal agencies, nongovernmental organizations, private-sector entities, and the first-responder and emergency management communities across the country. The NRP incorporates best practices from a wide variety of incident management disciplines to include fire, rescue, emergency management, law enforcement, public works, and emergency medical services. The collective input we received from our public- and private-sector partners has been, and will continue to be, absolutely critical to the implementation and continued refinement of the core concepts included in this groundbreaking national plan.
The NRP is built on the template of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which provides a consistent doctrinal framework for incident management at all jurisdictional levels, regardless of the cause, size, or complexity of the incident. The activation of the NRP and its coordinating structures and protocols-either partially or fully-for specific Incidents of National Significance provides mechanisms for the coordination and implementation of a wide variety of incident management and emergency assistance activities. Included in these activities are Federal support to State, local, and tribal authorities; interaction with nongovernmental, private donor, and private-sector organizations; and the coordinated, direct exercise of Federal authorities, when appropriate.
The NRP is also an essential element of the broader policy coordination and reconciliation mechanisms of the Federal Government. The operational and resource coordinating structures described in the NRP are designed to support existing White House policy mechanisms and decisionmaking entities during the response to a specific threat or incident. Also, while the NRP itself creates no new authorities, it serves to unify and enhance the incident management capabilities and resources of individual agencies and organizations acting under their own authorities in response to a wide array of potential threats and hazards.
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