The Building Should Have a File
Robert Grand · Battalion Chief who still runs calls
There’s a set of warehouse buildings in my old response area, the Giustina buildings, and every crew that worked that district knew about the bowstring trusses. Not from a class. Not from a preplan. Somebody told you. It got passed along for years, and when I worked there, it got passed to me. If you catch a working fire in that warehouse, those trusses are likely to come down, and you make your decisions accordingly. That’s good knowledge. It’s specific, it’s operational, it’s correct, and it has probably kept people alive.
It’s also one conversation away from being gone.
Those buildings sit right near my current station. The Grain Millers building downtown is the same story. Most people don’t think about grain dust as something that burns, let alone something that goes off, but it does. The elevators in that building run straight up to the towers with next to no safety features on them, the kind you hop on and off. The whole place is old and hard to work in, sitting in the middle of downtown and built to move grain rather than to have anybody fight a fire inside it. Every bit of that gets handed down the same way the trusses did.
I passed it on the same way it came to me. By mouth, to whoever showed up next. I never wrote it down either.
We Already Do the Hardest Part
The hardest problem in capturing what an organization knows isn’t storage. It’s getting experienced people to sit down and honestly say what they learned, including the parts that make them look slow or wrong. Most organizations never solve it. Outside our service the numbers are ugly: eighty four percent of senior leaders say they’re worried about knowledge walking out the door with retirements, and eight percent of organizations consistently capture any of it (APQC, https://www.apqc.org/resource-library/resource/navigating-great-retirement-km-ai/html). They’re finding that out on the back end, after the people already left.
We solved that part decades ago and called it the after action review. Nobody has to be convinced. You have a significant call, you sit down, people say what actually happened.
So the gap isn’t what everybody assumes. We don’t have a capture problem. We have a problem with what happens to the capture about four hours later.
Say It, and Let It Leave the Room
The framework is three parts, and you can hold all of it in your head. Say it, attach it, find it.
Say it is the part we already do, so the change is small. The review has to leave the room as something other than everyone’s memory of the conversation, and it has to have a shape: what did we find, what did we do about it, what would we tell the next crew.
That last question is the one that matters and it’s the one that usually never gets asked out loud.
One rule comes before all of it. A crew will not talk honestly into a recorder they believe ends up in somebody’s discipline file. They’ll give you a clean, useless version, and after two rounds of that everybody stops taking it seriously. So the non-punitive rule gets written down, published, and visibly honored the first time it’s tested, or none of the rest of this is worth starting. That’s not a technology decision. It’s a leadership one, and it decides whether you get the real thing or the sanitized version.
Attach It to the Building, Not the Call Number
Here’s the hinge, and it’s the part I’d argue we’ve had backwards.
Our reviews get filed by incident. Incident number, date, maybe a type code. That’s a perfectly reasonable way to organize records and a completely useless way to retrieve knowledge, because no firefighter in the history of this service has ever gone looking for an incident number. They go looking for a building. They pull up in front of something and they want to know what this place has done to us before.
That’s not a documentation problem. It’s a retrieval problem, and we’ve spent thirty years solving the wrong one.
Attach the review to the structure. The address, the parcel, the complex. Every AAR written about the Grain Millers building lives on the Grain Millers building, alongside every other one, in order. The elevator note goes there. The grain dust goes there. The layout that makes it hard to work goes there. Not because somebody wrote a beautiful preplan once in 2019, but because it accumulated, one call at a time, from the crews who were actually inside it.
Do that and the bowstring truss warning stops depending on whether a particular captain happens to be working that day.
Find It Before You Get There
The third part is the one nobody builds for, and it’s the whole reason to do the first two.
Be honest about where we are. No department I know of is doing this today. We run CAD, records systems, ePCR, preplan software, and all of it stores things. None of it remembers anything, and none of it hands you the right piece at the moment you need it. This is a build, not a description of somebody’s Tuesday.
But picture where it goes. Fifteen years out, a company officer gets dispatched to a warehouse fire and pulls the building on the way in. Not a form. The building’s file. Three reviews, oldest to newest, from crews who were inside it in 2027, 2031, and 2038. A note about the trusses that traces back to somebody who retired before that officer was hired. A field correction from 2033 when the place sold and the interior layout changed. They know before the doors open, and nobody had to still be working there for that to happen.
That officer would be in high school right now. Everything they’ll know about that building on that day is either being said out loud in a bay this year and kept, or said out loud this year and lost.
The Plan Should Get Better Every Time Somebody Walks It
There’s a second stream feeding the same file, and it’s the prefire plan.
Most prefire plans are a snapshot. Somebody built it, it was accurate the week it was made, and it’s been drifting out of true ever since while buildings get sold, remodeled, renumbered, and repurposed. Crews walk through these structures constantly and see that drift in real time. It almost never makes it back into the plan, because the plan is something done to the crew rather than something the crew owns.
Flip that. Let the people walking the building correct the plan from the floor, with a name and a date on it, so the next reader knows who said it and when. Attribution isn’t bureaucracy here, it’s how a future officer decides what weight to give a note that’s eleven years old. A plan built that way doesn’t decay. It gets better every time somebody sets foot in the place.
What to Do About It
Here’s the next step, and it’s smaller than it sounds.
Pick the three buildings in your district that everybody warns each other about. You already know exactly which ones they are, and so does every crew that runs that area. Write down what gets said about them, in whose words, and when. Attach it to the address, not to a call number. Then make the same thing happen after the next significant call in one of them.
That’s the whole start. Three entries and a habit. What you’ve built is the first shelf of a library that outlives every person currently drawing a paycheck at your department, and unlike almost everything else we buy, it can’t be purchased later at any price. A department that starts this year has real depth in a decade. A department that starts in a decade has three buildings and a good intention.
The trusses don’t care who’s working that day.
The file would.
Robert Grand is a Battalion Chief at Eugene Springfield Fire with 24 years of service. He writes Frontline Intelligence, a newsletter on operational doctrine, technology, and leadership in Fire & EMS.
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