Hello again!
It has been a lazy Wednesday and thus I wanted to share with you an incident that has truly taught me a thing or two.
It is an incident about a firefighter who ran towards the fire to save himself while others ran towards the river. Yes you heard that correct, he ran towards the fire!
I recently read about this beautiful incident that shows how presence of mind is an attempt known in science as “Creative Desperation”. It’s mentioned in the classic book “ Seeing what others don't” by Gary Klien.
On August 15 1949, a team of fifteen firefighters were dropped in the mountain range in Montana to contain and extinguish a forest fire. The Missouri river flowed just below the mountain range.
The fire fighters wanted to extinguish the fire from below as they wanted to stay closer to the river so that they could avoid unnecessary risks. While firefighting the team leader Warner Dodge saw a “spot fire” at the bottom of the valley, Spot fires are caused by embers from fire being carried by wind and can lead to a potential blowup.
Thus specific places near the down slope caught fire, Dodge knew that the fire would come roaring uphill and catch the firefighters in between, thus he instructed the firefighters to move to the northern side of the hill where there was no fire. Their position can be best understood by the graph below:
However the northern slope was steeper and thus made the running difficult. Fire spreads very rapidly in steep slopes and slowly the northern slop was nothing but a great wall of fire. It was at this point, point 7 on the graph that the other firefighters threw their tools and started running downstream towards the river where certain spot fires were raging but not a wall of flame like on the northern slope.
Dodge had a decision to make, either to run downstream with his fellow men or do something different. He calculated the wind speed to find that the spot fire will become a raging wall of fire before the team could reach the river. Thus he knew going downstream was fatal for him and others. He called out to the others to stop but unfortunately no one listened.
Thus is where creative desperation took over, an ingenious counter-intuitive tactic. Dodge lit a fire in front of him, wet a handkerchief and put it in his mouth and nose. and dived face-down into the ashes of the fire he had created to save himself from any flammable vegetation around him.
The other team mates looked up to see what he was doing and thought he had gone nuts. But Dodge had calculated two of the most vital things to save himself. Fire needs fuel, a flammable vegetation to grow, if only he could create an island for himself where in he could devoid the fire of any fuel to burn and he could dive under it to save himself. Ash was the answer as ash never catches fire as there is nothing left to burn in the ash. He could not change the geography of the region or the wind flow but he could make his enemy “fire” his ally. Prey on its weakness. Thus , Dodge “dodged” death by taking this counter-intuitive measure to save himself, while majority of his fellow fire fighters could not make it to the river and died.
This is perhaps the biggest lesson of presence of mind that I have come across to date.
I hope I have been able to share an important message through this story.
Hope you all have a good day!
- Yash
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