The Fire at the Fire Station
Columbia, Missouri, is typically a pretty quiet place, but occasionally something crazy happens and every once in a while something really crazy happens. It was the latter when I heard honking and yelling only to look out my office window to see a multi-colored minivan speeding down 10th Street with a flaming bundle of bamboo tied to its roof. As for why the minivan had bamboo tied to its roof and why that bamboo was on fire, I couldn’t tell you, but the reason it was speeding down 10th Street was because the city’s fire station is located about a block down from our office.
Curious what was going to happen next, I left my desk, went outside, and started walking toward the commotion. Stopped by a police officer who was setting up a safe perimeter I said, “How crazy is that?”
“Had to happen,” he replied. “Big fire hazard.”
So that’s one example of poor risk management. Because the longer you add to a bad situation with no consequences the bigger the consequence when it inevitably goes bad (shoutout 2008–09 financial crisis).
And with that takeaway maybe I could end this Opinion here. But!
Something else interesting transpired that day. And that’s that it turns out that one of the places firefighters are least prepared to fight a fire is at the fire station.
See, I’ve worked down the street from the fire station for six years now and never seen a fire. That’s because firefighters typically go to the fire. The fires don’t come to them. So when a multi-colored minivan with a flaming bundle of bamboo on its roof shows up on the fire station’s doorstep while the fire fighters are playing a friendly game of HORSE on their basketball hoop in the driveway and said minivan further parks in front of the garage blocking anyone’s ability to pull the fire trucks out and into service, well, it turns out that that pattern of facts makes it really difficult for them to fight a fire.
That said, it seems like it would stand to reason that if you have a fire, you should take it to the fire station. After all, that’s where all of the resources, skills, and expertise to extinguish a fire reside.
What that reasoning misses, however, is that everything about a fire station is designed to come to you. So context matters. By taking a fire to the fire station, you render those resources, skills, and expertise obsolete.
What ended up happening here is that the minivan burned up quite a bit while the firefighters kicked aside their basketball and figured out how to use the fire trucks while they were still inside of the garage at the fire station (and they did put out the fire and thankfully no one was hurt including the dog stuck in the minivan). And while that makes for a bit of an ironic outcome if you were to post it on the Internet, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. They were trained to respond to a fire, not have a fire respond to them.
Why is this relevant? Because context matters. You can spend all of the time and money in the world on resources, skills, and expertise, but if you deploy them in the wrong context, your return on that investment won’t be as expected. So no matter what you do, do it in context.
Also don’t keep adding kindling to the roof of your car. That may seem like an obvious point, but here we are.
– Tim
