It seems as though we here at Respondersafety.com are reporting on a stream of highway-related deaths and injuries that seems to continue without end. Just as I was sitting down to write this commentary, as message came rolling in to my computer about a Florida Highway Trooper that was struck on the side of the road, while he was off of his motorcycle writing a ticket.
According to WJXT News4Jax.com in Jacksonville, " … A Florida Highway Patrol trooper on a motorcycle was injured in a crash at Interstate 10 westbound at Cassat Avenue just before 6:30 a.m. Authorities told Channel 4 that Greg Edison was off his bike, writing a ticket at the passenger side of car in on the shoulder of the highway when a semi hit the motorcycle, then the car, which struck the officer. Edison was taken to Baptist Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries."
It seems as though emergency service people are being struck far faster than we can create safety courses, educational materials, and training sessions to educate our responders. I want to assure you that the Responder Safety Institute and Respondersafety.com are in the thick of the battle to make life safer on the highways of America.
Jack Sullivan, our Training Director, and Chief Bob Edwards are hard at work sharing what they know about how to operate safely at emergency scenes with the emergency service world. Steve Austin and I met with Jack on Sunday June 23, 2002 during his training session in Richardson Park, Delaware.
More than 50 people gave up their Sunday to participate in a classroom and field exercise session. One husband and wife were so dedicated to the concept of safety that they both attended, along with their infant daughter. Neither of them wanted to miss the knowledge that Jack took to their area.
On another front, Bob Edwards has become the highway safety prophet for New Jersey over the past six months. He has devoted countless hours to teaching a series of local courses throughout the northern part of our state. He has also spent a great deal of time and talent in creating a personal program to lobby state legislators. He wants them to join our highway safety battle.
On June 24 and 25, a new U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) initiative began its work in Fairfax, Virginia. The USFA has worked to adopt a series of goals to impact the problems facing the American Fire Service.
One of the major goals identified some time ago involved an effort to reduce firefighter deaths by 25 percent over the next ten years. As we all know there are many components to the issue of firefighter deaths. One of the areas that they are now working to address involves the fire personnel who are dying in vehicle crashes, and who are being struck by motor vehicles while operating at emergency scenes on the roadway.
In order to address this critical issue, the USFA assembled a group of subject matter experts from a wide variety of public and private sector groups and associations, as well as a number of federal agencies. The objective of the conference was to create a new, unified effort to lessen the loss of life on the highways.
Steve Austin and I were invited participants in the National Forum on Emergency Vehicle Safety. We spent two days brainstorming to create a new thrust to improve the manner in which emergency service personnel interact with the world of motor vehicles.
The effort includes two complimentary aspects of safe operations on the highways. The first involves emergency vehicles and their safe operation. The second involves on-scene operations on the highway. Both of these must be addressed to insure an all-encompassing approach to making the world safer for our people.
The forum discuss for distinct areas of concern:
- Human factors and training issues
- Technology
- Laws and Rules
- Standard Operating Procedures
As Steve Austin has often stated, we find ourselves at the second most dangerous place in the fire service when we set the parking brake and step out of our vehicle onto the street. With this in mind, we worked to insure that adequate consideration was given to studying the various factors involved in highway safety, such as:
- Reflective materials on apparatus
- Reflective materials on our people
- Proper emergency lighting
- Proper scene control
Each of these areas needs to have an in-depth study performed. At the very least, we owe it to the 25 fire service people who have been killed on the highways since 1996. We need to create the data with which to identify the best practices in each of these critical areas.
Conference attendees also devoted a great deal of time and thought to the safe operation of emergency vehicles. We all reviewed some really shocking statistics that told us that a large number of people are killed while operating two specific types of vehicles:
- Personal vehicles
- Tanker (tender) vehicles
The one major fact that seemed to bleed into every aspect of the two-day conference was the lack of hard data in several areas:
- Vehicular accident injuries
- Backing accidents
- How many crash incidents occur in any given year
The lack of a central database seems to hinder any attempt to create a true picture of the vehicular safety problem. We are generally able to find out when someone is killed. However there is no database to capture the injury and near-miss statistics.
It is my personal opinion that we must support the creation of a national fire service database that allows us to get a better handle on the reality of vehicular and highway safety numbers. I realize that this will be difficult, but we must try.
As Deputy United States Fire Administrator Charles Dickinson stated to us all on the first day of the conference, " … We have to keep our eyes on the prize. To me, that prize is a reduction in the unnecessary loss of life that the emergency service world suffers every year.
If I can be so bold as to tell it like I see it, " … there are a lot of really dedicated emergency people dying for some really simple and easily corrected reasons."