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Ramsey County-Wide Emergency Operations Plan Revision 5.1,June, 2005 to those who need access to it so that they can effectively and safely conduct their missions. The information and intelligence function also has the responsibility for coordinating information and operational-security matters with public awareness activities that fall under the responsibility of the PIO, particularly where such public awareness activities may affect information or operations security. Area Command An Area Command is activated only if necessary, depending on the complexity of the incident and incident management span-of-control considerations. The County Incident Manager, an agency administrator or other public official with jurisdictional responsibility for the incident usually makes the decision to establish an Area Command. An Area Command is established either to oversee the management of multiple incidents that are each being handled by a separate ICS organization or to oversee the management of a very large incident that involves multiple ICS organizations, such as would likely be the case for incidents that are not site specific, geographically dispersed, or evolve over longer periods of time, (e.g., a bioterrorism event). In this sense, acts of biological, chemical, radiological, and/or nuclear terrorism represent particular challenges for the traditional ICS structure and will require extraordinary coordination between Federal, State, local, tribal, private- sector, and nongovernmental organizations. Area Command is also used when there are a number of incidents in the same area and of the same type, such as two or more hazardous material (HAZMAT) or oil spills, and fires. These represent incidents that may compete for the same resources. When incidents do not have similar resource demands, they are usually handled separately and are coordinated through an Emergency Operations Center(EOC). If incidents under the authority of an Area Command are multijurisdictional, a Unified Area Command is established. Area Command has the responsibility to: • set overall incident-related priorities. • allocate critical resources according to priorities. • ensure incidents are properly managed. • ensure incident management objectives are met and do not conflict with each other or with agency policy. • identify critical resource needs and report them to EOCs and/or multiagency coordination entities. • ensure short-term emergency recovery is coordinated to assist in the transition to full recovery operations 38