For years, the fire departments have worked to standardize their operating procedures across jurisdictions within geographic areas. Having the same procedures for key response activities has improved services to the public and the safety of fire service personnel. However, in many jurisdictions, this proven approach has not been applied to traffic incident management (TIM) and has rarely been done in cooperation with other agencies outside the fire service. In this program, you will learn about some fundamental Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that can be used to standardized traffic incident management. You will also learn several critical recommended practices you can ensure are included in your department's TIM SOPs. Coordination with other responding organizations is critical to safe, quick clearance, so you will also learn techniques for working with other agencies when implementing consistent TIM SOPs for all entities that work together to respond to roadway incidents in your jurisdiction.

Please note that, in this program, we will use the term SOPs to describe the procedures used to achieve a particular objective. These procedures may have other names in some jurisdictions, such as (Standard Operating Guidelines) SOGs. The term "SOPs" is meant to be all-encompassing for the many ways policies and procedures can be described and should not be read as excluding other naming conventions like SOG.