Triage

you are in this shape if

• First-come-first-served is quietly killing the worst cases
• Your experts spend peak hours on cases a novice could clear
• Everything escalated is labelled critical, so nothing is

the moves

Sort by severity, not seniority

An explicit scale applied at the door, blind to rank, politics and arrival order.

Tier the responders

Cheap generalists clear the routine majority; scarce experts see only what the tier below escalates.

Give the incident a command structure

One commander, defined roles, and severity levels declared out loud, so coordination survives the chaos.

where it was solved

1. 1797Napoleon's Grande ArméeMilitary medicineSurgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey treated the wounded strictly by severity, ignoring rank, and built 'flying ambulances' to reach them during battle.The word and practice of triage; the ordering principle every emergency system since inherits.
2. 1972California fire servicesEmergency managementAfter catastrophic wildfire coordination failures, agencies built the Incident Command System: one commander, modular roles, common terminology.ICS became the US national standard and was adopted far beyond fire — hospitals, utilities, and eventually software incident response.
3. 2003GoogleSoftware operationsSite Reliability Engineering formalised severity levels, paged tiers and an incident command role copied consciously from emergency services.SEV levels and incident command are now default practice across the software industry.
4. 2004Craig Fugate / Florida Division of Emergency Management (later FEMA)Disaster responseFugate noticed that Waffle House — a chain famous for staying open through disasters on backup plans and generators — tracked local damage better than the reports his team was waiting on: a full menu meant power and supplies were intact; a limited menu meant they weren't; a closed location meant serious damage. His team started marking maps by 'green,' 'yellow,' and 'red' Waffle House status, reading a private chain's own resilience as a live severity signal instead of waiting on formal surveys.The informal index gave responders same-day, on-the-ground severity reads ahead of official assessments. During the 2011 Joplin tornado, the local Waffle House stayed open on bottled water and plastic serviceware even as better-resourced chains like Starbucks stayed shut — exactly the kind of signal the index was built to catch. Fugate brought the practice to FEMA when he became its Administrator in 2009, where it was used informally across response operations, though a 2017 FOIA response confirmed it was never adopted as an official FEMA metric.

what breaks in transit

• Severity inflation: when priority is the only currency, everything becomes a SEV-1 within a year — the scale needs an auditor.
• Triage criteria encode values; importing a scale imports someone else's definition of 'severe'.
• Tiering fails when the bottom tier can't recognise what it can't handle — escalation paths need training, not just existence.

adjacent plates

• 05The handoff
• 04The felt wait