NFPA Journal - November/December 2019 - 8

Editor's Note by Scott Sutherland

Executive Editor, NFPA Journal

A Fire Story
mantra among editorial
types is that it takes a village
to assemble a magazine-not
exactly an original notion,
but an apt one nevertheless.
Here's another mantra: Everyone in the
village has a story.
Not all of those stories are ready for
prime time at any given moment. A story
may not have a time hook, the thing that
helps readers understand why they're looking at a particular article right now. There
might not be enough at stake to convey the
urgency the topic demands. The story may
not have simmered long enough to yield a
larger story or a big-picture takeaway that
can sometimes hold universal truths.
But when a villager offers up a story and
those elements (and many more) are present, it can lead to something special.
Matthew Foley's cover story on the Worcester cold storage fire is a good example.
That piece began its life as a Dispatches
article for this issue, one intended to mark
the anniversary of the 1999 fire in an
abandoned warehouse that killed six firefighters in Worcester, Massachusetts, and
left a lasting imprint on the nation's fire
service. As I talked to Matt about the piece,
though, a different kind of story began to
present itself. It emerged that he actually

Scott Sutherland
ssutherland@nfpa.org

witnessed the fire-he was a kid growing
up nearby, had family in Worcester, and he
and his Dad saw the blaze from I-290, the
highway that ran just yards from the hulking old building. More details emerged: his
Dad was a longtime friend of one of the
firefighters who perished; the fire played a
part in Matt's decision to pursue a graduate
degree in fire protection engineering; and
the blaze helped shape the career path that
led him to NFPA, which he joined last year
as a researcher in the Applied Research
Division. The fire, in short, changed his life.
Sometimes the best thing to do when
faced with the inevitable is to simply step
out of its way. For Journal, that meant
shifting some things around as a section
story became a feature story, and as a feature story became a cover story. For Matt, it
meant intertwining his own story with the
story of the fire and its long aftermath. You
can read the result on page 30.
I should also note that Matt is something
of a one-man village in this issue: he was
responsible not only for the cover story,
but also co-authored the 2018 large-loss
fires report that appears on page 44. He
also wrote the "Looking Back" article, on
the tenth anniversary of a deadly Russian
nightclub fire, that appears on page 88.
Thanks, Matt-you can take a break now.

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8 | NFPA JOURNAL * N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 9

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NFPA Journal - November/December 2019

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