morning lineup firegeezer on 28 Jun 2008 07:45 am
Morning Lineup - June 28
Dave Statter published an item yesterday on STATter911 (HERE) that caught my attention. It comes from Burlington, Ontario, where they announced a new response policy that mandates staying within the speed limits while responding on emergency calls. This new practice is effective immediately.
That’s right, now the fire apparatus goes from a quick response to being the slowest vehicle on the road. After all, who else keeps it down to 25 mph on the city streets? (I think they call it 40 Km up there.) The deputy fire chief who was speaking for the dept. about the change claims that slower fire trucks are unlikely to collide with other vehicles on the road.
Then he goes on the tell of the horrible results when other drivers fail to properly pull over as Big Red comes barreling up onto their rear bumper. Well, that problem’s solved. Now, instead of pulling over, the other cars will be pulling away. The desk jockey who worked this out with his calculator has no doubt come to the conclusion that if you just go slow enough, then you’ll have a clear path all the way to the fire. Whether it’s still burning when you finally get there is another question altogether. I can just hear it now: As the crew is eyeballing that luscious column of black smoke climbing to the clouds, Cap’s telling the driver, ”C’mon…slow it down now…..sloooow you go. Attaboy.”
The line of cars sitting while waiting for a red light to go green is handily taken care of with the $1 million-worth of new strobe light mechanisms that trigger the traffic signal as they approach. Now those gadgets are really nice, and they do work fine by stopping the cross traffic at an intersection. But Burlington is banking on the cars in the FD’s lanes to go tearing off to the next signal and leave this mystical clear path for the safe-driving pumper to cruise on through.
Call me cynical - I usually am, anyway - but I don’t think this scheme is going to pan out quite as nicely on the road as it does on paper. I mentioned this several months ago, but I’ll repeat it here…. quite a few years ago, maybe 20, my department decided that we would always come to a full stop at red lights before continuing through an intersection. But when we started doing this, it just confused the other motorists. As soon as we came to a stop, they would start up again, filing back into the intersection, making things worse that it was before we stopped.
I think they figured that if we had stopped, even though the siren was still wound up, then it was because we had gone as far as we were going to. After a few days of that, everybody in the field informally changed the procedure to slowing way down under the red light, but not actually stopping unless somebody else was there, of course.
The point that I’m leading up to is this, don’t go puzzling the other drivers like that. They are not used to sudden changes. The secret to a safe trip is safe driving.
Now let’s get our safety practices going by checking out this equipment. I’m going to get the coffee started.
