Ask a volunteer department for a piece of its own history and watch what happens. Somebody thinks it might be in a filing cabinet. Somebody else has a version on their computer at home. A third person remembers it being handled by a leader who has since moved on. The record exists, probably, somewhere, in some form. Getting to it is another matter.
That is how records work at a lot of departments. Not because anyone did it wrong, but because it grew that way, one call and one file and one person's computer at a time.
Scattered is the default, not the exception
Paper records sit in files, or they sit wherever the person working on them left them. The electronic copies live on different computers depending on who did the work. There is no centralized place to look, so finding something means knowing who to ask, and different information means asking different people.
Even information that is specific to a single member can be hard to lay hands on. Even data that is not confidential, that nobody has any reason to guard, is not simply available. It has to be requested. And when you request it, you may get it, and you may not.
That last part is the tell. When getting your own department's non-sensitive information is a coin flip, the problem is not any one file being lost. The problem is that there was never a place for the files to be.
What that actually costs
The visible cost is the work that gets redone. Someone needs a number, the number is not where it should be or does not match the other copy, so the work happens again. Multiply that across a year of calls and it is a real amount of time spent reconstructing things that were already done once.
The quieter cost is the information that is simply gone. Not misplaced, gone. The person who had it left, the computer it lived on was replaced, the paper it was on did not make it into a file. You do not always know what you have lost, which is its own kind of problem, because you cannot go looking for a record you do not know existed.
Underneath both is a continuity problem. The department's memory lives in scattered pieces held by multiple people, and every time one of those people moves on, a piece of the memory goes with them. A department is supposed to outlast any of its members. Records kept this way do not.
Where it bites the hardest
It hurts everywhere, but there is one place it bites that nobody wants to think about.
A member dies, or comes down with an illness, and the question is whether it was service related. The answer is worth a great deal to that member's family, and the proof is in the records. Response history, exposures, time on scene, years of it, sitting in paper files and on old computers.
Now someone has to pull all of that together. Tabulate it, reconcile it, make it into something that holds up. That takes time, and the time is not abstract. It is a delay for surviving family members who are waiting on the fire department to come through for them when it matters most.
That is the real weight of scattered records. Not the redone spreadsheet. The family waiting on paperwork that should have been ready.
The fix is not a better filing cabinet
The instinct is to say the answer is organization. Put everything in one place, label it well, keep it tidy. That helps, but it treats the symptom. Scattered records are not really a storage problem. They are an entry problem.
Records end up scattered because they get created scattered. Each piece of information is entered somewhere, by someone, in its own place, and the scattering is baked in from the first keystroke. You cannot organize your way out of that after the fact any more than you can un-scramble an egg. The only real fix is to change how the information gets in, so that it lands in one place, tied to the call it came from, the first time.
That is why the run report is the center of everything. Almost every piece of what a department needs to know traces back to a call. Who responded, what apparatus, how long, what happened, who was affected. If the run report is accurate and everything hangs off of it, the records are not scattered, because there was never a moment where they lived in separate pieces. The accuracy of that one thing is what makes everything downstream of it trustworthy.
Get the entry right and the retrieval takes care of itself. Get it wrong, or get it scattered, and no amount of filing fixes it later.
Why this is worth solving
The need was always there. Every department that has ever tried to find its own history has felt it. What changes is the understanding that it does not have to stay that way, that the scattering is a solvable problem and not just the cost of being a volunteer department.
If your department felt this problem, others almost certainly do too. It is close to universal, and it is close to universally accepted as unavoidable. It is not. It is a choice about how information gets entered and where it lands, and that choice can be made differently.