Vehicle Rescue Safety - Part I

Vehicle Rescue Safety - Part I

Vehicle Rescue Safety - Part I

by RON MOORE

(Members Zone Contributor Firehouse.Com Contributor)

The scene safety officer deals with hazards. Any situation or set of circumstances with the potential to do harm is a hazard. All vehicle crash-scene hazards fall into one of three general categories; environmental hazards, scene hazards, and hazards presented by the vehicle itself.

Environmental hazards are related to the weather, and time of day and include extremes of heat, cold, wet, dry, and darkness that increase risks to crews and patients.

Photo By Ron Moore
Environmental hazards are related to the weather, and time of day and include extremes of heat, cold, wet, dry, and darkness that increase risks to crews and patients.

Incident scene hazards relate directly to the specific incident scene and include control of crowds, traffic, the danger of downed electrical wires, the presence of hazardous materials, even the very location of an emergency.

A vehicle perched precariously on the edge of a bridge railing or one that has crashed into a structure causing a partial building collapse are examples of scene hazards requiring special safety activities early in the incident.

The final category is extremely important and includes the hazards that most often confront emergency service personnel. Vehicle hazards, those directly related to the vehicle itself, include undeployed airbags, fuel system concerns, electrical system and battery electricity, stability of the vehicle, sharp glass and metal, leaking hot antifreeze, and engine oil, transmission oil or antifreeze spills.

Even contents inside vehicle trunk or cargo area are typical of vehicle hazards that can be encountered.

Photo By Ron Moore
Incident scene hazards relate directly to the specific incident scene and include control of crowds, traffic, the danger of downed electrical wires, the presence of hazardous materials, even the very location of an emergency.

'Responding To/Returning From' Safety

Each emergency vehicle driver and that crew's officer or the senior crewmember 'riding seat' must be held responsible for the safe and efficient operation of that vehicle. For the personal safety of the responding personnel, it should be required that the operator check and confirm that all personnel riding in the vehicle are fully dressed in appropriate protective clothing and are seated and belted before the vehicle begins its response.

Crewmembers must remain seated and belted throughout the entire response to the scene. The officer of the vehicle must be held ultimately responsible for the overall safe operation of the vehicle while responding to and returning from an incident.

The speed of a responding vehicle is also an important safety issue. If two emergency vehicles travel a total distance of 10 miles on an expressway, one vehicle traveling at the posted speed and the other vehicle exceeding the posted speed by 5 mph, the faster driver would arrive only 54 seconds ahead of the slower and safer one.

Photo By Ron Moore
Vehicle hazards, those directly related to the vehicle itself, include undeployed airbags, fuel system concerns, electrical system and battery electricity, stability of the vehicle, sharp glass and metal, leaking hot antifreeze, and engine oil, transmission oil or antifreeze spills.

If you, as the driver of the speeding vehicle, were involved in a crash while responding, could you justify your operating procedures in court before a jury? Following the same reasoning, response protocols should be developed that prohibit emergency warning lights and sirens from being used for responses to or from drills, training sessions or assignments to cover or fill in at a neighboring station.

In a court of law, the actions of the operator of an emergency vehicle if involved in a crash while responding to a call will be held to the definition of the term 'true emergency'. Responders must fully understand this court-tested criteria for evaluating if there is negligence on their part.

As defined by the U.S. Department of Transportation Emergency Vehicle Operator's Course, a true emergency is any situation in which there is a high probability of death or significant injury to an individual or group of individuals or a significant loss of property, which can be reduced by the actions of an emergency service. This definition has gained legal acceptance nationwide. How many of our lights and siren Code 3 responses really fit this court definition?

If an emergency vehicle is involved in a crash while responding to a scene or returning from an incident, statistics show that the crash will most likely occur at an intersection. The road where the crash occurs will typically be a level and dry road surface. The intersection will have either stop signs, yield signs or be controlled by an operating traffic light.

Photo By Ron Moore
If an emergency vehicle is involved in a crash while responding to a scene or returning from an incident, statistics show that the crash will most likely occur at an intersection.

Because these locations are the most frequent crash site for responding vehicles, there is a clear need to implement special precautions at all intersections. Electronic systems such as the 3M 'Opti-COM?' traffic control systems are available to give responding emergency vehicles the capability of pre-empting and controlling traffic signals. With these types of systems, as the emergency vehicle approaches a traffic light, the emitter on the vehicle sends a signal to the traffic signal control box. The controller then pre-empts the normal red, yellow and green light sequence and turns the light green for the approaching emergency vehicle and red in all other directions. When the fire department in Syracuse, New York, equipped their emergency vehicles with such a system, the accident rate for fire vehicles during emergency responses fell dramatically.

In lieu of these systems, operators must be prepared to bring their emergency vehicle to a complete stop at any red light, stop sign, yield sign or negative right of way situation. The emergency vehicle may proceed through the intersection only after accounting for all traffic. No emergency vehicle should be allowed to drive at more than 10 miles per hour above the legal posted speed for any street, road or highway. This speed limit should be reduced for conditions of inclement weather or limited visibility. A maximum speed limit for emergency vehicles should be set at 65 miles per hour for expressway-type driving regardless of the legal posted speed limit. At this speed, it is true that motorists may be actually passing responding emergency vehicles. However, this Code 3 speed limit is easily justified as being a reasonable and prudent maximum response speed.

Standard operating procedures must also be established for situations when two emergency vehicles approach the same intersection from different directions. Preplanning of response routes and knowing the response routes routinely used by crews from surrounding stations or communities can also aid in preventing problems at an intersection. To address this situation, there are several protocols that can be written into a department's emergency vehicle operation procedures.

Photo By Ron Moore
Electronic systems such as the 3M 'Opti-COM?' traffic control systems are available to give responding emergency vehicles the capability of pre-empting and controlling traffic signals.

For example, when one vehicle is approaching an intersection where other responding units are typically encountered, the apparatus officer can transmit a message on a common radio frequency notifying the other apparatus that they are approaching and from a given direction. This advisory cautions others to be alert for the opposing traffic. Another example of protocols written to address intersection responses states that the first emergency vehicle at an intersection will have the right of way over the later arriving vehicle. If there is a traffic signal operating at the intersection, the emergency vehicle with the green light will have the right of way over the vehicle approaching against the red signal. When two vehicles approach the same intersection during a response, the vehicle that must make a turn must yield to the vehicle that will continue straight through the intersection.

Some emergency vehicle drivers have the mistaken idea that a 'parade' of emergency vehicles, responding in bumper-to-bumper fashion to a scene, is a safe response. The truth is that when emergency vehicles follow each other too closely, the motoring public has little or no opportunity to realize that there is more than one emergency vehicle. Citizens in private vehicles may clearly hear and see one vehicle go by and then blindly pull into the path of another emergency vehicle. Adequate spacing between responding vehicles must be maintained so that each vehicle is observed and reacted to as an individual response unit.

Escorting of emergency vehicles, particularly ambulances, by police vehicles also presents a high degree of risk. Unless the emergency vehicle driver and crew officer are completely unfamiliar with the incident location or some other justifiable situation exists, police escorts of emergency vehicles should be avoided as unsafe.

Confusion among responding vehicles (for example, whether the incident is at 112 Down Street or 112 Brown Street) increases the chance of response accidents. Responding vehicles may be caught unaware when a misinformed crew makes an erratic turn onto Brown Street when everyone else expected them to continue another four blocks to the correct location on Down Street. Having a dispatch protocol that requires broadcast of not only the street address but also the nearest cross street, can minimize such confusion. In addition, as a unit comes on the air to report that they are enroute to the scene, they can be required to repeat the address. This verifies that all units are heading to the same emergency scene.

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