The Emergency Support Functions of the National Response Framework (NRF) are activated to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during emergencies and disasters. The NRF, as part of the National Strategy for Homeland Security, maintains the guiding principles enabling response partners to craft a unified national response to emergencies and disasters of all scales. The ESFs function at the operational level and are utilized to provide assistance and organization. There are 15 ESFs, each covering a particular enumerated protocol, such as ESF 1 (Transportation), ESF 8 (Public Health and Medical Services) and ESF 15 (External Affairs).
Basic Emergency Support Functions training is provided for free to the general public and to those given specific ESF responsibilities. Both groups are free to access this information on the FEMA website. This allows all parties to build their own knowledge and competencies concerning both basic ESF information and each of the ESFs as well. The more detailed and focused ESF training programs, which are organized by various coordinating agencies for those formally involved, aim to hone ESF-specific responsibilities to ensure true disaster preparedness.
The FEMA website offers free, self-paced courses under its Independent Study Program (ISP). These courses aim to help individuals describe the overall purpose and scope of each ESF, identify the assistance each ESF aims to provide its target group, identify the typical activities specific ESF teams and resources aim to accomplish and describe partnerships formed between each ESF and other key organizations and response agencies. The more specialized courses have much more specific and detailed objectives. For instance, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) jointly hosted an ESF 4 course, known as N9033, for their own staff as well as selected Department of the Interior (DOI) staff. In this course, they aimed to teach their staff to describe resource mobilization processes for federal assets, illustrate incident business management guidelines and apply principles needed to run the ESF 4 desk given a simulated emergency.
Those wishing to take any of the specific FEMA online courses designed to teach the specifics of each Emergency Support Function must first take any of the introductory courses---IS 800 (National Response Framework, an Introduction), IS 800a or IS800b. Similar requirements may also be in place for more specialized courses. N9033, for instance, also had IS 800 as a prerequisite, but had an additional prerequisite course---IS 700, an introductory course to the National Incident Management System (NIMS), as well as recommended training courses such as I-300 (Intermediate Incident Command System) and I-400 (Advanced Incident Command System).
The basic and short online courses on the FEMA website provide overviews of each of the 15 ESFs. They are geared at educating those given management responsibilities during emergencies and the general public as well. In addition, the coordinating agencies in charge of each ESF may also organize more specialized training and competency-building exercises of their own for their own personnel, such as the training hosted by the USFS and the USFA for USFS, USFA and DOI personnel serving in ESF4.