The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

His was the most interesting story, at least to Carter. At 5:55 p.m., with the fire just a minute away and rushing toward him at ever greater speed, he’d lit a second fire, up the hill he needed to climb. As his fire burned the grass in front of him, he walked into it and threw himself onto the hot ashes. He’d called for his men first to abandon their packs and Pulaskis, and then to follow him into the fire he’d set. Either they didn’t hear him or thought he’d lost his mind; at any rate, they didn’t really know Wag Dodge or have any reason to trust him. Dodge alone heard and felt the main fire passing by on either side of him, leaving him unscathed. Until that moment there was no history of a firefighter having done such a thing, but it became an accepted strategy in the fighting of grass fires. “Escape fire,” was what they’d call it. The event so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, best known for his only other book, A River Runs Through It, that he wrote a book about it, called Young Men and Fire. It so interested a doctor named Don Berwick, maybe best known for running Medicaid and Medicare during part of the Obama administration, that he’d given a talk about it. Carter had heard the talk and thought: the Mann Gulch fire isn’t about fire, or at least not only about fire. It’s also about pandemics. In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down: You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too l...

The Escape Fire: Lessons from Disaster on Acting Before It’s Too Late