Although I'm sure there will be those who feel this article is a whack in the shins for their efforts at helping the victims of disasters, I think its been a long time coming.

I agree that in most cases, unauthorized responders want to go to help others and have very altruistic motives for being in the middle of the disaster of the week, but honestly, when you show up uninvited, it causes all kinds of problems you didn't think about.

One, the IC can't account for you when you're just in there free-lancing, and free-lancing is what it is. I'm sure they didn't plan for you to be there, so although they are having difficulty feeding their own personnel and the victims, now you have come along and added another mouth to feed.

Not only does the IC not know what you are capable of, he doesn't know what you brought, nor can he anticipate it being there in a few days when all of the adrenaline has worn off and the news media has gone home (when often they could really use the help, so they can go to their own homes).
Plus, what about your home community; who's taking care of things back there?

This isn't an issue of anything except that as a legally deployed responder, there are methods to track you, to account for your existence, to feed you, to provide you resources if you need them, to use you in an incident plan, and to insure you if you get hurt.

Credentialing is a good thing and will make a lot of our jobs much easier when this initiative is finally up and running.