The Incident Command System gave the camp its structure, and it was also part of what students came to learn. Lt. Col. Adam Lulay of the Oregon National Guard opened the first afternoon with the basics. ICS grew out of California wildland firefighting in the 1970s, he told students, when crews found that their problem was not too few resources or too few smart people but too little coordination. The point, he said, is that everyone has one boss.
“The beautiful thing about this ICS is you only got one boss, one supervisor.”
He also told them to expect confusion. “So you’re going to be confused for the next few days because you’re learning,” he said. “It’s by design.” Levi Hopkins, the camp’s planning chief, who serves in the same role on Department of Forestry incident management teams, described the camp as “a type three organization”: a mid-sized incident that can operate with a few gaps in the chart.
The 2026 organization:
ICS position | Who fills it |
Incident Commander | Oregon National Guard colonel |
Safety Officer | Agency volunteer |
Liaison Officer | The education sponsor’s on-site administrator |
Public Information Officer | Agency PIOs, mentoring student PIOs |
Operations Section Chief | Camp director |
Operations divisions | One lead educator per village: three builder villages, culinary, communications, safety |
Task force and crew leaders | Pod educators, each leading about six students |
Planning Section Chief | ODF incident management planning chief, with the activity and volunteer coordinator as deputy |
Logistics Section Chief | Agency volunteers; the medical unit under the safety village educators |
Agency representatives | ODHS, OEM, ODF and the project manager |
The written Incident Action Plan set three objectives for the week: workforce and career development (credentials, technical skills, connections to employers); disaster preparedness and survival training; and immediate community impact, meaning shelters and sheds built on site and delivered to rural communities ahead of fire season and to urban shelter programs. Its first-day command emphasis was setting up living quarters, hygiene and shelter bases, with watch items for heat, insects, hydration, and slips, trips and falls. Each builder division’s assignment sheet carried a single special instruction: build five structures by June 26.
Here is a general schedule and timeline for days during the camp:
Time | Meeting | Who attends |
6:30 a.m. | Command and General Staff meeting | Incident Commander, section chiefs, Safety, PIO, Liaison |
7:30 a.m. | Morning brief at breakfast | Whole camp |
8:30 a.m. | Tactics pre-planning | Operations Section Chief and staff |
9:00 a.m. | Tactics meeting | Operations, Safety, Planning, Logistics |
10:00 a.m. | Planning meeting | Command and General Staff; student Planning and PIO leads |
Lunch | Brief; Incident Action Plan distributed and posted | Section and village leads |
Dinner | Hotwash: what went well, what the camp needs | Section and village leads |
9:00–9:30 p.m. | Focused close: village groups with counselors, then whole-camp updates and shout-outs | Whole camp |
What worked. The 6:30 a.m. command meeting let leadership hear about problems and fix them the same day, from a snack table and bug spray to a rain plan for the final build. The ICS-qualified volunteers needed little instruction. When the field kitchen failed on the first night, the logistics chief knew the repair was his to make and kept dinner on track while National Guard cooks waited for parts. When a wildfire started a few miles away midweek, the structure produced an evacuation-ready plan within about twenty minutes (see “Writing a site-specific emergency plan”).
What to fix, from the after-action reviews:
Write the Incident Action Plan before camp, and hand every student and adult a copy at the opening brief. In 2026 the team completed parts of it during the week.
Publish the filled-in org chart to educators and counselors before camp, and post it on a central board. Without it, people took every question to the same three leaders. One leader wrote that people came to them “by default, even though it was out of chain of command,” because they didn’t know whom else to ask, or because others in the chain lacked the information to answer.
Hold the whole-camp briefings as scheduled, run by Planning. In 2026 the operational briefings slipped after day one, and the scenario and chain of command slipped with them.
Keep the same section chiefs all week. An ODF reviewer recommended against staffing command roles with drop-in volunteers, and recommended a “closed” camp for command staff as well as students.
Use a resource request form for supplies, instead of hallway asks.
Require one ICS training before camp, even a recording of the year-one overview. The free federal ICS 100 and 200 courses take an hour or two each.
An ODF reviewer sketched a cleaner structure for next time. Large earthquakes occur; the state stands up an area command, which no one staffs at camp; the state assigns a Type 3 team at the camp to provide as many shelters as possible by the end of the week. The program director serves as Operations Section Chief, each builder village lead serves as a division supervisor, and teachers serve as crew or task force leaders. The team writes priorities on the incident objectives form, ICS 202, where everyone can see them.