I don't often ride in the front seat of an apparatus, but we like to send five firefighters on our ladder truck when we're dispatched on automatic aid for a structure fire in a neighboring community. On those rare occasions when I ride, the regular officer usually gives up the right seat to me, and with it comes all the responsibility for crew safety. One afternoon, before we left the station, I called back into the crew cab to make sure that everyone had secured their seatbelt, and visually checked that the driver had fastened his as I snapped mine into place. On this run, we had several major intersections to cross, so as the officer I needed to make sure that opposing traffic saw, heard and yielded to our approach.
At one particular intersection, the cross street where we needed to turn left had three lanes of traffic. I looked to the right and could see the cars in the first two lanes brake and yield to our now-stopped apparatus. As we began our turn, a sedan several car lengths back from the stopped traffic changed into the curb lane to continue through the intersection. My driver also saw this sudden move and immediately came to a complete stop as the sedan cruised through the intersection oblivious to our apparatus.
That driver was cruising along without a care or concern to the other stopped traffic until he looked left and made eye contact with me. He first looked puzzled but then was overcome with sheer terror a split second later. Once he cleared the intersection, the ladder truck continued its turn and the same driver yielded to us in the curb lane about 200 feet down the road.
After we returned from the call, we had an informal discussion about defensive driving, especially the proper actions of our apparatus driver in coming twice to a complete stop and the importance of seatbelts for all firefighters. We also compared our use of seatbelts to that of citizens we had encountered on two recent calls for motor-vehicle accidents with entrapment.
The first occurred early on a Sunday morning when two teenagers occupied a late model sports coupe that left a residential street at a high rate of speed, struck a concrete street post and continued several hundred feet until striking a large tree head-on in the middle of a front yard. The driver received severe head trauma and had to be extricated from the vehicle. The extrication and transport of this victim took less than 11 minutes after our arrival, but he succumbed to his injuries later at a nearby trauma center. The accident reconstruction showed this vehicle left the road at 74 mph, but lost inertia after striking the sign post and hit the tree at 30 mph. The driver was not wearing a seatbelt; in contrast, the passenger wore his and walked away from the crash with minor injuries.
A second accident occurred less than two weeks later when a car fleeing a police pursuit crashed into an SUV carrying a father and young son. The SUV rolled over several times, yet when firefighters arrived they were able to remove both the father and son from the vehicle with just minor abrasions. The father had the benefit of both seatbelts and air bags, while the son had been properly restrained in a child's car seat in the rear of the overturned vehicle. The damage to the SUV far exceeded that done to the sport coupe in the earlier accident, yet one had to conclude that seatbelts made the difference between life and death, or at least prevented debilitating injuries.
So why is it that we, as firefighters and paramedics, who see these motor-vehicle accidents day in and day out, find it difficult to use seatbelts? We have "Firefighter Close-Calls" to warn us of potentially unsafe practices. We have "Everyone Goes Home" as our motto and the mandatory use of seatbelts as part of our standard operating procedures — so why aren't we using them? No doubt, firefighting has its inherent dangers, but seatbelts and modern crew cabs should make driving to a fire the least dangerous aspect of our response. Could it be — knowing the way that firefighters think — that we sometimes make sacrifices, like using seatbelts, in order to gain an advantage that might give us a second or two more time on the fire scene?
Some prime examples are when firefighters are not fully dressed in their PPE before getting onto the truck; unbuckling their seatbelt to reach for a tool before arriving on the scene; or standing up before the truck comes to complete stop. I use these examples because when I was a much-younger firefighter, I did all three and was lucky not to pay for my actions.
As fire chiefs, we have the obligation to make things as safe as possible for our responding personnel. For that reason — and despite the fact that our SOP calls for the mandatory use of seatbelts — we decided against a walk-through model with extra seating when we recently ordered a new rescue truck so that the officer could constantly monitor the actions of the firefighters seated in the cab while en route to the emergency.
To find out the latest on seatbelt safety, I contacted Dr. Burton Clark of the National Fire Academy, who has conducted a crusade for seatbelt use in the fire service. Clark indicated that failure to use seatbelts still is the No. 1 safety violation in the fire service, and that vehicle crashes are the No. 2 cause of line-of-duty deaths, with the lack of seatbelt use still being a major contributing factor in LODDs. During 2009, there were 10 LODDs and scores more injuries from motor-vehicle crashes involving fire apparatus. Of the 10 deaths in 2009, six firefighters were shown to have not been wearing seatbelts. Three others died as a result of accidents where seatbelts would not have made a difference, such as one crash where the vehicle plunged several hundred feet while driving off road in heavy smoke conditions.
Two inventions started to gain universal acceptance in the mid 1970s: seatbelts and smoke detectors. Even though the population of the United States has grown from 215 million to 309 million people in 35 years, residential smoke alarms have reduced fire deaths from more than 12,000 in 1975 to about 3,500 last year. In that same period of time, seatbelts primarily were responsible for reducing motor-vehicle deaths from more than 51,000 to 34,000. We, as firefighters and fire chiefs would not think of living in a home without smoke detectors; why then should we tolerate the lack of seat-belt use on our apparatus, when that alone could reduce firefighter deaths by as much as 20%?
Clark has pushed for every firefighter, EMT and paramedic in the U.S. to sign the National Fire Service and EMS Seatbelt Pledge. The pledge was initiated to honor firefighter Christopher Brian Hunton, who fell out of a moving Amarillo, Texas, fire-department vehicle on April 23, 2005. Hunton was on the department for one year when the accident occurred, and he died from his injuries two days later. Hunton was not wearing his seatbelt.
We may never know how quickly an incident like that can happen, but I have had a similar incident happen twice in my career. As an assistant chief two decades ago, I was responding to a working fire in an attached garage and met one of my engines at an intersection. The officer of the engine waived me through and for what appeared to be the longest time I noticed in my rearview mirror that the engine did not move out of the intersection. After the fire, I found out the reason. As we passed, the officer been reaching for the microphone to tell me on the fireground channel which direction he was going to take to the fire, but the sleeve of his turnout coat caught the door handle and the door opened fully. He would have fallen out of the apparatus except for his driver reaching over the engine cowl to grab his turnout coat.
More recently, my newest engine in Wyoming, Ohio, suffered a catastrophic failure of a door latch as the truck returned from a fire in a neighboring community. In this instance, the firefighter was buckled into his seatbelt. The direst consequence of this incident was that the door had to be secured with a bungee cord and the apparatus taken out service until it could be repaired.
The National Fire Service and EMS Seatbelt Pledge is very simple. It states:
I pledge to wear my seatbelt whenever I am riding in a fire-department vehicle. I further pledge to insure that my brother and sister firefighters riding with me wear their seatbelts. I am making this pledge willingly; to honor Brian Hunton, my brother firefighter, because wearing seatbelts is the right thing to do.
For more information on using seatbelts or for information on the National Fire Service and EMS Seatbelt Pledge, go to www.everyonegoeshome.com or www.trainingdivision.com/seatbeltpledge.
Stay safe.
Chief Robert R. Rielage, CFO, EFO, MIFireE, is the chief of Wyoming (Ohio) Fire — EMS, a 78-member combination fire department bordering Cincinnati. He previously served as the fire marshal of the state of Ohio. A graduate of the Kennedy School's Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at Harvard University, Rielage holds a master's degree in public administration from Norwich University and is a past-president of the Institution of Fire Engineers — USA Branch. He is also a contributing editor for FIRE CHIEF.
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