Emergency Response and Incident Management have received increasing attention in recent years as processes vital to communities and economies throughout the world. However, relatively little operations management (OM) research addresses these processes. We argue that these processes comprise a distinct sector within the broader field of service science, and that the relative lack of investigations within this important sector is due, at least in part, to failure of our current classification models to correctly identify this sector. As a result, this sector and its associated research opportunities are effectively rendered ‘invisible’ to the OM discipline. This problem is demonstrated with respect to several well-known OM models and taxonomies, and the overlooked opportunities are discussed.