Happy Monday!
The nearby wildfire got me thinking about today’s word-of-the-week…
EFFICIENT
Firefighting brings a strange mixture of efficient and inefficient.
Huge tanker planes drop chemical retardant, strategically creating barriers and lines designed to constrain the fire. One plane does work that couldn’t be accomplished by dozens of ground crews. It’s an efficient, big-picture way to contain and re-direct the fire’s path.
At the same time, an entire crew works feverishly to save a historic mountain school building while teams of volunteer firefighters risk personal safety to protect individual homes belonging to families they’ll likely never meet. With limited resources and so many needs, why would commanders indulge the “inefficiency” of devoting people and equipment to shield comparatively “small” targets?
The overall priority is constraining the fire’s growth quickly and efficiently. The most efficient allocation of resources would be to create a containment barrier as quickly as possible and simply allow the fire to burn itself out.
But every person, home, and animal matters, too. We demonstrate our humanity in the way we deal with individual circumstances. Saving one home, one pet, one life, consumes disproportionate resources. It’s not efficient, but that’s what we do, when we can.
Have a great week.
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