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E x e c u t i v e S u m m a r y The National Response Framework (NRF) provides foundational emergency management doctrine for how the Nation responds to all types of incidents. The NRF is built on scalable, flexible, and adaptable concepts identified in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) to align key roles and responsibilities across the Nation. The structures, roles, and responsibilities described in this Framework can be partially or fully implemented in the context of a threat or hazard, in anticipation of a significant event, or in response to an incident. Implementation of the structures and procedures described herein allows for a scaled response, delivery of specific resources and capabilities, and a level of coordination appropriate to each incident.

Responding to disasters and emergencies requires the cooperation of a variety of organizations; the larger or more complex the incident, the greater the number and variety of organizations that must respond. Think of a residential fire: Firefighters are leading the charge; public works may be on scene providing traffic control; police are providing security; emergency medical services personnel are triaging, transporting, and redistributing injured to local hospitals; and a local nonprofit or voluntary organization (e.g., American Red Cross and Salvation Army) may be on hand to assist displaced residents. For large disasters, such as major hurricanes or earthquakes, the incident complexity is increased as others—such as states or tribes and, ultimately, the Federal Government—become involved. Businesses, voluntary organizations, and other elements of the private sector are also key stakeholders, providing the essential services that must be restored following an incident. The NRF provides the foundation for how these organizations coordinate, integrate, and unify their response.

The unprecedented scale of recent disasters has spurred continued innovation in response operations and highlighted the need for further progress to build resilient capabilities to respond to disasters of increasing frequency and magnitude. This fourth edition of the NRF embraces lessons-learned from those disasters and shares emerging best practices.

Since publication of the third edition of the NRF in 2016, disaster response operations have underscored the paramount importance of sustaining essential community lifelines. The Framework defines community lifelines as those services that enable the continuous operation of critical government and business functions and are essential to human health and safety or economic security. If disrupted, rapid stabilization of community lifelines is essential to restoring a sense of normalcy. Recent disasters have illuminated two underlying features of community lifelines that highlight opportunities to strengthen response planning and operations.

First, community lifelines are interdependent and vulnerable to cascading failures. For example, communications and electric power systems rely on each other to function; severe damage to one will disrupt the other. Most lifelines also rely on complex supply chains. Water and wastewater service depend on the resupply of a broad array of chemicals and—if power goes out—fuel for emergency generators. However, in a severe natural or human-caused incident, those supply chains themselves may be broken.

Second, community lifeline stabilization relies on businesses and infrastructure owners and operators who have the expertise and primary responsibility for managing their systems in emergencies. Accordingly, new doctrine and coordination mechanisms are needed to enable the private sector to play a larger, more comprehensive role in preparedness and response activities.

The NRF is structured to help jurisdictions, citizens, nongovernmental organizations (NGO), and businesses develop whole community plans, integrate continuity plans, and build capabilities to respond to cascading failures among businesses, supply chains, and infrastructure sectors, as well as collaborate with the private sector and NGOs to stabilize community lifelines and enable restoration

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of services in severe incidents. Critical infrastructure sector leadership (sector-specific agencies, government coordinating councils, and sector coordinating councils) create an established network to collaborate with their respective private sector partners and support cross-sector1 response operations. Often, Emergency Support Functions (ESF) work with sector leadership to bolster preparedness for cross-sector collaboration. This fourth edition of the NRF describes new initiatives that leverage existing networks and better integrate business interests and infrastructure owners and operators into the heart of emergency management.

The NRF describes ways to improve coordination and response structures to build preparedness for catastrophic incidents. Stabilizing community lifelines in catastrophic incidents is vital and extraordinarily difficult. Communities cannot meet these challenges solely by scaling up existing plans and capabilities. Rather, new mechanisms are needed to supplement and integrate those already in place and facilitate cross-sector coordination, while respecting the roles of private sector partners and authorities of agencies at all levels of government.

A new ESF #14 – Cross-Sector Business and Infrastructure is introduced to focus on engaging private sector interests and infrastructure owners and operators—particularly those in sectors not currently aligned to other ESFs—and conducting cross-sector analysis to help inform decision making. ESF #14 relies on other ESFs aligned with a critical infrastructure sector to continue coordination with their corresponding sector during response efforts. ESF #14 helps coordinate multi-sector response operations between (or across) the government and private sector for natural or human-caused catastrophic incidents that jeopardize national public health and safety, the economy, and national security.

This edition of the Framework also builds on the response approach in previous editions to address national security emergencies. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America notes that potential adversaries are developing advanced weapons and capabilities that could threaten U.S. critical infrastructure.2 Adversaries may also strategically target attacks to exploit interdependencies between infrastructure sectors and magnify cascading failures between them, posing incident response challenges above and beyond those created by earthquakes or other catastrophic natural hazards. The initiatives in this Framework address the resulting challenges for consequence management in ways that supplement and support other government, private sector, and NGO plans and coordinating structures.

1 Cross-sector operations are those actions taken by public and private sector organizations from one or more of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors to help entities or facilities associated with other sectors respond to an incident, being focused on preventing or mitigating cascading failures between sectors and restoring critical supply chains. 2 For more information on the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, see https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf.

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T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Evolution of the Framework ………………………………………………………………………………………1 Framework Purpose and Organization ………………………………………………………………………2 Scope…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………3 Intended Audience …………………………………………………………………………………………………….5 Guiding Principles …………………………………………………………………………………………………….5

Foundational Components ………………………………………………………………………………. 8 Prioritized Stabilization of Community Lifelines ………………………………………………………..8 National Incident Management System …………………………………………………………………….11 Core Capabilities ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..12

Operational Coordination ………………………………………………………………………………. 15 Private Sector Engagement ………………………………………………………………………………………15 Locally Executed Response ………………………………………………………………………………………16 State, Tribal, Territorial, and Insular Area Managed Response ………………………………..18 Federally Supported Response …………………………………………………………………………………19

Roles and Responsibilities for Response ……………………………………………………….. 25 Communities ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………26 Local Government …………………………………………………………………………………………………..29 State, Tribal, Territorial, and Insular Area Government …………………………………………..30 Federal Government ………………………………………………………………………………………………..34

Federal Authorities ………………………………………………………………………………………… 42 Federal Response and Assistance Under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act ……………………………………………………………………………………….43 Federal Departments and Agencies Acting Under Their Own Authorities …………………44 Federal-to-Federal Support ……………………………………………………………………………………..46 International Support ………………………………………………………………………………………………46 Federal Response and Assistance Available Without a Stafford Act Declaration………..47

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Operational Planning …………………………………………………………………………………….. 47 Federal Planning ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..48 Application for Planning ………………………………………………………………………………………….49 Continuity Considerations ……………………………………………………………………………………….50

Supporting Resources …………………………………………………………………………………… 50 Maintenance ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………50

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 51

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I n t r o d u c t i o n The National Preparedness System outlines an organized process for the whole community3 to move forward with its preparedness activities and achieve the National Preparedness Goal. The National Response Framework (NRF) sets the strategy and doctrine for how the whole community builds, sustains, and delivers the response core capabilities identified in the National Preparedness Goal in an integrated manner with the other mission areas. The fourth edition of the NRF emphasizes enhancing the unity of effort between the government and the private sector through better coordination and collaboration.

E v o l u t i o n o f t h e F r a m e w o r k The NRF builds on over 25 years of federal response guidance, beginning with the Federal Response Plan, published in 1992, and the National Response Plan, published in 2004. This fourth edition of the NRF reorganizes and streamlines the previous version of the NRF, expands principles and concepts to better integrate government and private sector response efforts, and introduces the community lifelines concept and terminology.

This document supersedes the National Response Framework, Third Edition that was issued in June 2016 and becomes effective 60 days after publication.

Community lifelines are those services that enable the continuous operation of critical government and business functions and are essential to human health and safety or economic security. In serious but purely local incidents, interruptions of water service, electric power, and other community lifeline components are typically brief and easy to mitigate. However, severe and widespread incidents can halt lifeline services for many weeks or months. Such disruptions are especially extensive in catastrophic incidents and may result in mass casualties and other cascading consequences.

Making community lifelines a core focus of incident response within the NRF offers unique benefits for incidents ranging from small-scale to catastrophic disasters. By building capabilities to stabilize4 and accelerate the restoration of community lifeline services, it will be possible to save countless lives, limit damage to the economy, help maintain essential services for critical national security installations, reduce the initial impacts of disasters, and facilitate recovery operations. While the primary focus of incident response remains on stabilizing community lifelines, other secondary considerations regarding the natural and cultural environment and economic factors are equally as important.

3 Whole community includes individuals and communities, businesses, private and public sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, faith-based organizations, nonprofit organizations, and all levels of government (local, regional/metropolitan, state, tribal, territorial, insular area, and federal). Whole community is defined in the National Preparedness Goal as “a focus on enabling the participation in national preparedness activities of a wider range of players from the private sector, including nongovernmental organizations and the general public, in conjunction with the participation of all levels of governmental in order to foster better coordination and working relationships.” 4 Stabilization occurs when immediate threats to life and property are anticipated, resourced, and managed and basic community lifeline services are provided to survivors.

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Community lifelines provide a valuable decision-making construct to integrate cross-sector5 response operations and reporting. Each lifeline depends on multiple infrastructure sectors, businesses, and supply chains to function. Focusing on community lifelines allows emergency managers and their partners to account for these complex interdependencies and prioritize response operations to achieve high-impact, multi-sector benefits. The Framework describes how the resources and capabilities of the Federal Government support such operations, while the new Emergency Support Function (ESF) #14 – Cross-Sector Business and Infrastructure Annex describes how it facilitates coordination and collaboration with business and infrastructure owners and operators to provide assistance and integrate the private sector's support during response, particularly for those sectors not currently aligned to other ESFs. Additional detail on the community lifelines can be found in the Prioritized Stabilization of Community Lifelines section.

Finally, the Framework’s focus on community lifelines necessitates deeper collaboration with the private sector and nongovernmental organizations (NGO). During the disasters of 2017 and 2018, individual businesses and infrastructure owners and operators (including public and private sectors) forged innovative, collaborative relationships with government agencies to help prioritize and accelerate the stabilization of community lifeline services. The fourth edition of the NRF and ESF #14 – Cross-Sector Business and Infrastructure Annex institutionalize their progress and build upon it in ways that respect the authorities, responsibilities, and roles of all public, private, and NGO partners essential to incident response.

F r a m e w o r k P u r p o s e a n d O r g a n i z a t i o n The NRF is a guide to how the Nation responds to all types of disasters and emergencies. The NRF is built on scalable, flexible, and adaptable concepts identified in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) to align key roles and responsibilities across the Nation. The NRF describes specific authorities and best practices for managing incidents that range from the serious but purely local to those that are catastrophic and national in scope.

Within the NRF, the term “response” includes actions to save lives, protect property and the environment, stabilize the incident, and meet basic human needs following an incident. Response also includes the execution of emergency plans and actions to enable recovery. The NRF describes doctrine for managing all types of disasters or emergencies, regardless of scale, scope, and complexity. The goals and objectives herein explain common response disciplines and processes that have been developed at all levels of government (local, state, tribal, territorial, insular area,6 and federal) and have matured over time.

To achieve the National Preparedness Goal, the objectives of the NRF are to do the following:

 Describe coordinating structures, as well as key roles and responsibilities for integrating capabilities across the whole community, to support the efforts of governments, the private sector, and NGOs in responding to actual and potential incidents;

 Describe how unity of effort among public and private sectors, as well as NGOs, supports the stabilization of community lifelines and prioritized restoration of infrastructure during an incident

5 Cross-sector operations are those actions taken by public and private sector organizations from one or more of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors to help entities or facilities associated with other sectors respond to an incident, focused on preventing or mitigating cascading failures between sectors and restoring critical supply chains. These operations include measures taken by infrastructure owners and operators, businesses, and their government partners to account for cross-sector interdependencies in incident response operations. 6 Per the Stafford Act, insular areas include Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Other statutes or departments and agencies may define the term “insular area” differently.

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and enables recovery, including the elements that support economic security, such as restoration of business operations and other commercial activities;

 Describe the steps needed to prepare for delivering the response core capabilities, including capabilities brought through businesses and infrastructure owners and operators in an incident;

 Foster integration and coordination of activities for response actions; and  Provide guidance through doctrine and establish the foundation for continued improvement of the

Response Federal Interagency Operational Plan (FIOP), its incident annexes, as well as department and agency plans that implement the FIOP.

The NRF also advances progress under the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. The Framework helps achieve the strategy’s first pillar: to “protect the American people, the homeland, and the American way of life.” To accomplish this goal, the strategy calls for initiatives to strengthen the Nation’s ability to withstand and recover rapidly from attacks and natural disasters. The NRF is structured to help achieve these goals by establishing a new federal ESF coordinating structure to help mitigate the impact of catastrophic incidents on community lifelines and account for the risk that adversaries will seek to complicate and disrupt U.S. response operations.

The NRF is composed of a base document, ESF annexes, and support annexes. The annexes provide detailed information to assist with the implementation of the NRF.

 ESF annexes describe the federal coordinating structures that group resources and capabilities into functional areas most frequently needed in a national response.

 Support annexes describe other mechanisms by which support is organized among private sector, NGO, and federal partners. The support annexes describe the essential supporting processes and considerations common to most incidents. Content found within the support annexes is superseded by changes and updates to legislation. The support annexes include the following:

− Financial management − International coordination − Public affairs − Tribal relations − Volunteer and donations management − Worker safety and health

The Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources Support Annex and Private Sector Coordination Support Annex, which supplemented previous versions of the NRF, have been superseded in this fourth edition of the NRF by ESF #14 – Cross-Sector Business and Infrastructure Annex, which has been added as part of this updated framework. All references to these support annexes within the ESF or support annexes should be read as referring to the ESF #14 – Cross-Sector Business and Infrastructure.

S c o p e The NRF is a framework for all types of threats and hazards, ranging from accidents, technological hazards, natural disasters, and human-caused incidents. This Framework is utilized to implement NIMS and describes whole community coordinating structures and response activities; in particular, the Framework outlines government, private sector, and nongovernmental roles to reinforce

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collaborative incident response.7 The NRF also describes the structure and mechanisms for national- level policy and operational direction for incident management to ensure timely and effective federal support to local, state, tribal, territorial, and insular area governmental activities and survivors. The NRF is applicable to all federal, local, state, tribal, territorial, and insular area departments and agencies that participate in operations requiring a coordinated federal response.

NRF elements can be implemented at any time for any hazard, including the employment of ESF mechanisms. The structures, roles, and responsibilities described herein can be partially or fully implemented in the context of a threat or hazard, in anticipation of a significant event, or in response to an incident. Implementation of NRF structures and procedures allows for a scaled response, delivery of the specific resources and capabilities, and a level of coordination appropriate to each incident.

The response mission area includes the capabilities necessary to stabilize an incident, save lives, protect property and the environment, meet basic human needs, restore community lifeline services and other basic community functionality, and establish a safe and secure environment to facilitate the integration of recovery activities.

In this fourth edition of the NRF, the thresholds for catastrophic incident response may vary depending on one’s perspective. A localized flood can be catastrophic to an individual family who lost their home and possessions, a severe tornado can be catastrophic to a town or city, and a hurricane can be catastrophic to a state or territory. At the national level, a catastrophic incident8 is one of such extreme and remarkable severity or magnitude that the Nation’s collective capability to manage all response requirements would be overwhelmed, thereby posing potential threats to national security, national economic security, and/or the public health and safety of the Nation. A national catastrophic incident implies that the necessary resources are not available within expected timeframes for incident response. During a national catastrophic incident, decision makers would be forced to consider the landscape of requirements and prioritize resources to manage shortfalls rather than to address all needs at once. Such a situation would also require the extraordinary means of mobilizing and prioritizing national resources to alleviate human suffering; protect lives and property; reduce damage to natural, cultural, and historic resources; stabilize the Nation’s economy; and ensure national security.

In this Framework, the term “incident” includes any occurrence, natural or manmade, that necessitates a response to protect life or property and includes planned events, as well as emergencies or disasters of all kinds and sizes. The NRF’s structures and procedures address how federal departments and agencies coordinate support for local, state, tribal, territorial, and insular area governments and how government at all levels works in unity with private sector and NGOs.

Nothing in the NRF is intended to alter or impede the ability of a local, state, tribal, territorial, or insular area government or Federal Government department or agency to carry out its authorities or meet its responsibilities under applicable laws, Executive orders, and directives.

7 The NRF must be consistent with all pertinent statutes and policies, particularly those involving privacy and civil and human rights, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 8 The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 defines the term “catastrophic incident” as “any natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other man-made disaster that results in extraordinary levels of casualties or damage or disruption severely affecting the population (including mass evacuations), infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, or government functions in an area.”

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I n t e n d e d A u d i e n c e The NRF is intended to be used by communities; the private sector; NGOs; local, state, tribal, territorial, and insular area governments; and the Federal Government, as well as other entities involved in response. The private sector includes for-profit and nonprofit organizations, formal and informal structures, commerce, and industries that comprise the national economy and are not part of a government structure. NGOs are a distinct category of organizations within the private sector that can include voluntary, ethnic, faith-based, veteran-based, disability,9 relief agency, and animal welfare organizations, among others, and are referenced separately. This all-inclusive whole community approach focuses efforts and enables a full range of stakeholders to participate in national preparedness activities and to be full partners in incident response, including emergency management practitioners, first responders, and community leaders.

Infrastructure owners and operators (in private and public sectors), and other elements of the private sector, are especially important partners for incident response and a key audience for the Framework. These partners are vital for strengthening the coordination between industry and government that is necessary to stabilize community lifelines after major incidents or events. They are also crucial partners for creating the plans and doctrine to support essential functions for cross-sector response operations, especially where their ability to volunteer capabilities and expertise provides vital (and in some cases irreplaceable) contributions to protecting public health and safety. Moreover, because catastrophic incidents will create far more requests for emergency resources and types of government assistance than can be immediately fulfilled, infrastructure owners and operators and other commercial interests can help government agencies establish objective, nationwide criteria to help inform the allocation of scarce resources to promote stabilization efforts, restore infrastructure, and to reduce morbidity and mortality.

The fourth edition of the NRF describes how the whole community contributes to and benefits from national preparedness and integrated incident response. This includes children;10 older adults; individuals with disabilities and others with access and functional needs;11 those from religious, racial, and ethnically diverse backgrounds; people with limited English proficiency; and owners of animals, including household pets and service and assistance animals. Their individual contributions and needs must be incorporated into response planning and delivery of the core capabilities. For further information, see the Core Capabilities section.

G u i d i n g P r i n c

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