From the Publishers Desk
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Lessons Can Be Learned From Experiences of Others
Experience is sometimes a harsh taskmaster, but the lessons learned when the chips are down are well remembered. However, it is not always necessary to undergo an arduous experience to learn these lessons.
We can benefit from the experience of others when they are considerate enough to share them with us. That’s why Fire Engineering especially likes to print articles that provide information gained through experiencing a situation that occurs infrequently—but may happen to you tomorrow. The story of the railroad derailment in Santa Barbara County, Calif., that appears on page 40 of this issue is that type of article—helping us all to learn through the experience of others. Keith Cullom concludes the article with four important lessons that fire fighters learned through their involvement in the incident.
There is no way you can prepare for that “one-in-a-lifetime” incident except by reading what others did in a similar emergency and using their experience—the things they would not do again as well as the things they did that worked well—as a basis for making your decisions.
New England has seemingly had more than its share of conflagrations over the years, but maybe that’s just because it has over three and a half centuries of existence. The latest fire that destroyed a sizable section of a New England city occurred in Lynn, Mass., and the story of that fire starts on page 22.
The conflagration of last Nov. 28, however, did not end the problems of the Lynn Fire Department that had fought 88 multiple-alarm fires during the first nine months of 1981. On Dec. 18, a nine-alarm fire occurred in a Lynn plastics plant. Again, the mutual aid system provided the companies requested by Chief Joseph Scanlon, although on not such a grand scale as for the conflagration. This time, fire fighters were summoned from only about 20 communities.
