Everyone Goes Home Seminar

[jasonstrite]

The NFVFD is hosting the Everyone Goes Home seminar on Saturday June 24, 2006. Seminar will start at 0800 and last approx. 3-3.5 hours. Looking forward to seeing you.

[jasonstrite]

If you are planning on attending this seminar, please reply to [e-mail]. Thanks and looking forward to seeing you.

Jason

[noelkline]

Jason,

Excellent class. The instructors really stick-it to the guys.

Noel
(everyone I think by now knows who I am)

[BigFoot]

Please do not take this message as a comment on this past weekend's events. I received this message almost two weeks ago and maybe I feel guilty for not forwarding the contents. While the recent events are fresh on your minds, please take care and ensure that everyone goes home. Please attend this course, it may mean the difference.

Maximum Speed!
Chief (Ret.) David A. Love Jr., VFIS Education and Training Specialist

This is the 24th in a series of columns on emergency vehicle safety. The columns are a component of VFIS’ “Operation Safe Arrival” initiative, aimed at heightening safety awareness and reducing the frequency and severity of incidents involving emergency response vehicles.

In the era of horse drawn apparatus, Emergency Responders had to drive those horses fast because of the significant delay caused by the entire process of response. It took time to hook up the team, respond to the call at 10 or 11 miles per hour, dig a hole in the street, and chop a wooden water main to draft from. All of those tasks may have caused an undue delay. However, those days
are gone and so should be our race horse mentality!

How many times do we have to be faced with the same news and the same obvious conclusion? Every day the headlines scream loud and clear:

• “Ambulance Overturns on a Rural Road”
• “Two Fire Trucks Collide at an Intersection”
• “Engine Overturns while Responding to Automatic Alarm”
• “Emergency Responder Strikes, Kills Citizen en route to Call”

Many of the alarms to which emergency service organizations (ESOs) respond are motor vehicle accidents. What are the lessons we have learned from thousands of such incidents?
1) Not wearing a seatbelt will greatly increase the rate and seriousness of injuries.
2) Intersections are very dangerous places.
3) Accidents caused by unsafe speed significantly increases the number and seriousness of injuries.
4) Excessive speed is frequently the cause, or at least an important factor, in most accidents.

Are we, as emergency responders, unable to learn lessons from the people we are charged to protect? It would seem so and that is unacceptable. We teach fire safety. Do we practice fire safety in our own homes? Many of us do. We teach driving safety in classes with emergency responders and the public and we may, in fact, practice safe driving in our own vehicles with our family seat belted in next to us.

Why then are we unwilling to have these lessons translate to our own emergency responses? Don’t we claim to be brothers and sisters in the emergency services?
What is our most valuable asset?
We talk a good game but our actions do not reflect those words. When are we going to recognize the foolishness of our actions during emergency responses and change our behavior?

Driving too fast is a combination of exceeding the posted speed limit, exercising cautionary speeds, ignoring weather or road conditions, poor judgment, adrenalin, radio communications, talk in the cab, and a dozen other factors. It all boils down to the emergency vehicle operator!

The question we must ask is, “How fast is fast enough”? This is the age-old question for emergency responders and there is no easy answer. Most state laws allow us the privilege of exceeding the speed limit with the caveat that emergency service responders do not endanger life or property and that they show due regard for the safety of others.

However, do most calls turn out to be true emergencies, where someone’s life or property are in danger? Will traveling in excess of the posted speed limit make a profound difference in the outcome?

How much time is really saved by speeding 3 miles down the road through intersections and snarled traffic at 70 miles per hour as opposed to the posted speed limit or at a cautionary speed? How many emergency responders and the traveling public have we placed at risk?

The question has been asked at various training seminars, “Can’t we be sued for not driving fast enough?” In today’s legal climate, you can be sued for just about anything at any time. But how many times have you seen someone successfully sued for not responding fast enough? In contrast, how many serious accidents happen each year that kill and injure emergency responders and the
public, that we are sworn to protect, by emergency vehicles that are driven in excess of cautionary speeds?

For decades, responding to and returning from the emergency scene has been one of the most dangerous times for emergency responders. So why are we reluctant to say that we need to place a limit on what we believe is an acceptable speed? Someone’s life may be in danger! I suppose that could be the case, so the question we need to ask ourselves is, “Is it ok to place people’s safety and
lives in danger for what may or may not be someone’s life in danger?”

So what do we need to do? We need to step back and realize that our total responsibility is to get our apparatus or ambulance from point A to point B safely, so we can perform the emergency task for which we were dispatched; not to get from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time. We are emergency responders, not race car drivers! Who is placed in danger when we exceed
cautionary speeds? We are. If we don’t make it to the emergency scene, who are we going to help, and who is it that we are going to injure or kill along the way?

I constantly hear that “the traveling public does crazy things when we approach them” or “they fail to yield the right of way” or “that they do unexpected things”. If we know that up front, then we need to drive defensively and watch out for them. How many people drive through your first response area in a day? Who is it going to be easier to train, our drivers or the traveling public?
Most people will do the right thing if we just give them enough warning and time to react to our warning signals! Wear your seatbelt, be extra vigilant in intersections, and reduce your speed. After all, we are in the business of saving lives and protecting property. Not destroying them!

This is not about changing standard operating guidelines, changing state laws, or even training. This is about a cultural change that says we will protect our own first, and, at the same time, protect the public so that everyone goes home at the end of the day or the end of the incident.

How fast is fast enough? Perhaps if we stop using the word “Fast” when referring to emergency response and replace it with the word “Safe”, then our racehorse mindset would change as well.

What is your Maximum Speed going to be? Is it worth the risk?

David A. Love Jr., the former Chief of the City of York, Department of Fire and
Rescue Services, is an Education Specialist for VFIS. He is a thirty-five year
veteran of the emergency services, and currently serves on the NFPA 1500
1001-1002 Committees.


Posted by:
Don Eshleman, Jr.