Media Review: Informed’s Homeland Security Field Guide

I am a fan of field guides. I have a plastic recipe box full of them that I carry in my chief’s buggy (SUV). What my small reference library provides are easily accessible reference sources/cheat sheets to assist in successfully handling a call or rescue. The latest one to make “the box” is Informed’s Homeland Security Field Guide by Jan Glarum and Eric Swanson.

If the name Informed Publishing sounds familiar to you, it is because they have been creating useful field guides since 1986. The original and still the best, in my opinion, is Informed’s EMS Field Guide, now available in both ALS and BLS versions. The company’s other field guides span the gamut from pediatric drug dosages to a fire/rescue field guide. Informed’s latest offering, Homeland Security Field Guide, is a little 3½- by 5-inch guide that gives you one heck of a lot of useful information organized in an easy-to- access order. Beginning with recognition of a problem, on-scene size-up and an overview of responder safety tips for law enforcement, fire/rescue and EMS responders, the guide moves on to suggested tactics, and ICS and operations templates.

Once the initial assessment, size-up, response and overhead management issues are addressed, the guide moves on to specifics. Explosive and chem/bio incidents are specifically reviewed, and these sections contain some handy informational bullets, such as hitting the deck when an explosive detonates, as the blast force and shrapnel projectiles tend to be dispersed at an upward angle from the explosion. There are also sections on suicide bombings and post-blast area assessment and tactics.

You get a lot of useful information richly supported in color-coded sections with multiple illustrations that assist in getting the point across. All of this is slim enough to fit into a uniform shirt pocket.

The Homeland Security Field Guide, like the other seven Informed field guides, is listed at $19.95. For more information on this and the Informed field guides, or to order one for yourself, visit www.informedguides.com.