BY ALAN BRUNACINI
As I have trudged through all the stages and ages of being a firefighter, I have developed the habit of writing an abundance of notes. I described in a recent column my longtime habit of writing notes in my shirt pocket weekly notepad, where I record the educational, interesting, and fun events I encounter. Through the years, these notes have accumulated to the point where the written material became a textbook. This has been a very positive thing because it caused me to somehow translate, summarize, and organize a stack of written notes that would fill a washing machine packing box into the form of a book. It is difficult to make sense out of a dump truck full of shirt pocket notes along with scribbles written on napkins and paper placemats: Writing them is easy; summarizing them can be a challenge.
In my earlier days of writing notes, I was trying to make sense out of mostly operational/tactical stuff in which I was involved. These technical topics have system elements that are fairly straightforward to pin down and organize. Much of that early focus on doing and managing tactics and strategy led me to become a young student of incident command. The basic command system was simplified and developed around eight standard command functions.
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