Gordon Graham here again with my monthly opportunity to say hi (and thank you for your great work) and to give you some thoughts on what I see going on in public safety today. Today’s iteration of this piece is not filled with good news. When I wear my “Risk Management” hat, I spend a lot of time studying accumulated data. Pretty exciting stuff, huh! Well, I do it for a living. I spend a ton of time reading “stuff”. I love reading things, particularly “studies” and “final reports” that contain analysis of raw data.

I don’t limit my readings to studies though. I will do a quick read of virtually anything. I read an interesting piece recently about a Chief of Police who was fired for stealing beer from the Fire Department refrigerator. You will probably want to reread that line. I could ramble on about that for a while, but I will not. I read another piece recently about how dirty TV remote controls are in hotel rooms, and that has caused me to modify a behavior – a lot.

Regarding studies, I read an interesting study recently about medical malpractice. Doctors in America are killing 100,000 Americans every year. And this number excludes pharmacy error and that is a whole different issue. Now, 100,000 deaths caused by Doctors (you know, the “do no harm” crowd) is an interesting piece of data, and perhaps they should not have told me that one. Because as a proud member of American Law Enforcement, I know that “we” are always in trouble for killing people. With that in mind, exactly how many people do law enforcement professionals in our fifty states kill annually?

Well, it has to be a million people, cause you are always reading about it. Sorry to disappoint you, but it is not a million people being killed by cops in America every year.

Well, it has to be 100,000 – the same number that doctors are killing. Again, sorry to tell you that is not the right number either.

Well it has to be 10,000 – yeah, it has to be someplace around 10,000 because we hear it about all the poor people being killed by cops almost every hour. Guess, again – it is not close to 10,000.

Here is the accurate data. On average, cops around America kill someplace around 700 (that is seven hundred) every year. And this is guaranteed to generate some interesting comments! 80% of the people we kill – they needed to die right then at that moment when the cop did the deed!! So that puts the number of “innocent” people we are killing at less than 150 per year. And most of those are not really innocent, but this is not the forum for that discussion. You can send the nasty comments and snide remarks to gordongraham@earthlink.net. Mrs. G and I love to read them during “Jeopardy”.

My point is this. I always like to study the “numbers” – “the data” and find out what is really going on. I study tragedies including deaths, injuries, embarrassments, internal investigations and other nasty consequences. And I love to study “close calls”, “near misses” and other forms of mistakes, errors, omissions, and lapses that almost end up in nasty consequences. We can learn so much from the study of “data”.

Having the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes of the past is the foundation for most of real risk management. To be sure, there will always be risks out there that we have not yet experienced or ever thought of, but studying the past in any profession is a good way to predict (and thus address in advance) future problems we may encounter.

With this in mind, refineries have not figured out any new ways to blow up. If you study enough refinery tragedies (and all you have to do is google that phrase) you can learn how they occur, and then put together control measures to prevent future similar occurrences. Dupont has done that and has a phenomenal safety record. Airplanes have not figured out any new ways to crash. If I were running an airline, I would give all of my employees a regular diet of how past airplane wrecks occurred, and put together control measures to prevent future occurrences. Southwest has done that and has a fantastic and lengthy record of safe operations.

And here is one more for your consideration. Construction personnel have figured out no new ways to get hurt on construction projects. But check out the safety record of personnel working on “Intel” projects. I had the opportunity to take a look at what the good people at Intel are doing to maximize safety on their FAB 32 project outside of Phoenix and they do a phenomenal job in protecting their people.

Each of the above companies has identified and evaluated the risks involved in their respective occupation, and they have put together a slew of control measures to prevent bad things from happening.

So what am I leading up to. Firefighters (and cops for that matter) have not figured out any new ways to get in trouble. Compare and contrast the data of LODD’s in both the fire profession and the law enforcement profession from 2006 to 2007. Sadly, the fire service LODD’s increased somewhat, and the law enforcement numbers increased dramatically. You can check out the US Fire Administration site for the fire data and ODMP.org for the Law Enforcement data. The data speaks for itself, but there is some information hidden in the data that I want to discuss with you today.

I am hugely concerned with the “roadway incursion” issue. Here is the bottom line. When you are outside of your vehicle on or near a roadway you are participating in an “ultra high risk” activity. The first two websites I visit every morning are www.firefighterclosecalls.com and www.officer.com. Here is an observation I have made over the last year or so.

There is not a day that goes by that a public safety employee is not struck by passing traffic someplace in America.

I will repeat that for purposes of emphasis only.

There is not a day that goes by that a public safety employee is not struck by passing traffic someplace in America.

And here is a nasty prediction. The number of public safety employees who will be struck by passing traffic will only increase in the near future. There are many reasons why this will occur including:

• More public safety personnel working on or near roadways.
• An increase in the number of people who should not be given licenses to drive.
• An increase in the number and type of distractions inside the vehicle including GPS devices, iPhones, iPods, ifood, iBooks, iHairbrushes etc. etc.
• And finally, an increase in vehicle traffic passing emergency service workers who are outside of their vehicle working on or near a roadway.

So what is the answer? The key to all risk management is identifying and evaluating risks, and putting together control measures up front that will change, reduce or eliminate the probability or the consequences of a harmful action.

I could ramble on and on about wearing bright colors, emergency vehicle placement, proper use of traffic control devices, situational awareness, the importance of being vigilant, the importance of increasing the conspicuity of your vehicles, and having a lookout on scene whose sole mission is watching for approaching errant drivers.

But I will cut right to the chase and try to get you to visit www.respondersafety.com. The good people who have put this site together “get it” and have put together some strategies and tactics that will definitely be of benefit to you who work in such a high risk area. They have analyzed the data (a lot of it) and developed some control measures to maximize responder safety. That is probably how they came up with the name for the website, but I am just guessing on that one.

I will close with this thought. Do you remember the first time you were outside of your vehicle on a freeway or high-speed roadway? I remember my first time and I was scared to death. The freeway was shaking, cars, trucks and big-rigs seemed to be missing me by inches and I could not wait to get back in my car. And I did the same thing the next day, and the next day and the next year and the next year, and the next decade etc. What was extremely scary now becomes routine. And when things get routine, we get complacent. And when complacency is present in the performance of any “high risk” task, you are in route to nothing but trouble. So to wrap up this episode of my ramblings, please remember to talk about this issue with your co-workers and –

Always Be Vigilant.

Thanks for visiting this site and I look forward to seeing you again next month.

Gordon Graham

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 8:16 am and is filed under FD Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.