If your escape route is... a locomotive?
In Post #39 - Learning and Command we dove into the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894. Here’s how Pyne described a scene from that blow up:
The flames at times outraced the engine. Heat, smoke, and even fire enveloped the tiny train from front to rear. Flames came through the ventilators at the top of the passenger cars and through cracks along the windows. When the rear coach took fire, its occupants fled into the next car. One by one the heat blistered the exterior paint of the other cars, then burst them into flame. The stifling heat caused even the interior paints to blister, then run. The interiors were swallowed in darkness, broken only by screams and shouts.
Wild.
The story gets worse from there. People’s clothes caught fire. Bad burns. And the people on the train were the lucky ones. Back in town, over 400 people lost their lives.
About 200 miles away, and about 120 years later, the Pagami Creek Fire blew up.
Pagami was unexpected. People were out in front of it. Pagami had all the makings of being another mass casualty event like the Hinkley Fire (and like the Peshtigo before that).
But somehow disaster was averted on Pagami.
Over a hundred members of the public were safe by the time the fire arrived.
Somehow fire leaders managed to protect the public, even from a fire blow up that was unforeseeable.
Their story is a remarkable story of command, leadership and learning.
Here’s the link:
Don’t miss this point. Everything turns on it: because the leaders learned from the earlier mess and improved their system, they averted a mass casualty event from happening later.
Through Operational Learning, they protected people, even when the fire did something nobody could predict.