Skip to content

Morning Lineup – April 26

2 comments

Fortunately, I broke my fever last night around midnight.  It had gone up to 101º during the day and it had me puzzled.  I have no idea where that stuff came from.  But I had my Saturday night hamburgers anyway.  They do have marvelous healing qualities, you know, and there’s the proof.

Yesterday’s last posting about the Jacksonville rescue truck being struck by a car at an intersection reminded me of one of my favorite anti-establishment themes.  The reports from Jacksonville say that the firetruck had stopped completely at the intersection and then was starting up again when it was hit.  I brought this up over a year ago and I’ll do it again because I think it’s something worth thinking about.

Quite a number of years ago, about 20 I think, my department came out with the order that all responding apparatus will come to a complete stop at controlled intersections when the light is red.  So we started doing that and it made a mess.  It didn’t work so well and I’ll tell you why.

What happened was when we came to the full stop, many of the other drivers thought we were where we wanted to be (otherwise, why would we have stoppped?).  And after we were stopped, the cross traffic started moving again.  And now this clear intersection became clogged up like a Roman traffic circle and we had real problems getting through.  You could see the puzzled expressions on the drivers faces when we suddenly started up again.

So we refined our behavior where we would slow way down to a crawl while going through the red light to where we could stop on the literal dime if we had to.  But we made a point of continuing to move forward as long as it was safe.  Sure, every once in a while you get the yayhoo wearing the earphones who blows through, but you’re ready for that.  That worked out so much better and we never had any problems with cross-traffic after that.  So much of driving depends on common sense.  Keep it turned on.

Now let’s get the equipment checked out (and make sure the brakes are ok).  I’ll go start the coffee.

Posted by on April 26, 2009 • Filed under: morning lineup
  • Dal90

    Not that I want more paperwork in the least, but one issue we have is we do not have comprehensive enough statistics, or as far as I know comprehensive studies, of the “butterfly effect” of various “safety” policies.

    It’s not to say reckless is OK, but delay and hesitancy over the unlikely can be just as bad.

    This isn’t going to show statistically up in small towns or even counties. Maybe in very large metropolitan areas you’d have a large enough sample size — but even there I suspect only the top three or four largest departments individually are big enough.

    While I understand there are other factors usually cited — build up from years of suppression, changing weather patterns, invasive species, etc., if you look at our pattern of the size of wildland fires here: http://www.wildfiretoday.com/news/2009/3/30/large-fire-management-in-2009.html you’ll note the big increases start around 1990.

    Anyone whose been around the fire service that long knows the late 1980s was when the major “safety” pushes were hitting full stride. Whether it was NFPA evolving to incorporate safety into their fire service related codes, to ICS, to modern bunker gear, Firefighter certification becoming expected, etc, etc.

    I think it’s a legitimate question to ask if the size, severity, and firefighter deaths associated with wildfires are increasing because of the hesitancy and delay from “safety.” It definitely correlates, the question becomes if it’s a causal relationship.

    I haven’t looked into the statistics on the structural side.

  • Dal90

    Not that I want more paperwork in the least, but one issue we have is we do not have comprehensive enough statistics, or as far as I know comprehensive studies, of the “butterfly effect” of various “safety” policies.

    It’s not to say reckless is OK, but delay and hesitancy over the unlikely can be just as bad.

    This isn’t going to show statistically up in small towns or even counties. Maybe in very large metropolitan areas you’d have a large enough sample size — but even there I suspect only the top three or four largest departments individually are big enough.

    While I understand there are other factors usually cited — build up from years of suppression, changing weather patterns, invasive species, etc., if you look at our pattern of the size of wildland fires here: http://www.wildfiretoday.com/news/2009/3/30/large-fire-management-in-2009.html you’ll note the big increases start around 1990.

    Anyone whose been around the fire service that long knows the late 1980s was when the major “safety” pushes were hitting full stride. Whether it was NFPA evolving to incorporate safety into their fire service related codes, to ICS, to modern bunker gear, Firefighter certification becoming expected, etc, etc.

    I think it’s a legitimate question to ask if the size, severity, and firefighter deaths associated with wildfires are increasing because of the hesitancy and delay from “safety.” It definitely correlates, the question becomes if it’s a causal relationship.

    I haven’t looked into the statistics on the structural side.