Close Calls
Written by Gordon on October 13th, 2009
Gordon Graham here and hello again. Thank you for visiting this great site, and as you know I have a monthly opportunity to give you some thoughts on your business – from the eyes of someone outside your business and because of my “outside” status I tend to look at things that go on inside your business just a bit differently.
And as I was perusing the news over the last couple of days, I came across a story out of Florida that might be of some interest to you. It was a tragedy – that I think could have been averted – and hopefully by the end of this piece I will give you a “control measure” to help prevent a similar tragedy from ever occurring.
First, here is a redacted version of the story that caught my eye.
A paramedic van left a fire station in route to a call and ran over a homeless guy (who was very drunk and asleep) apparently adjacent to the door. And the involved fire department already has decided to alter its policies to prevent a recurrence of the event that saw firefighters accidentally run over the person they were called to assist.
Starting today, a firefighter will have to open the fire station garage bay doors using the keypad inside the station, not the remote control inside the responding vehicle. That firefighter will then exit the building and scan the driveway before the rig leaves the station on an emergency run.
“They can take a quick look before the path of the vehicle,” said the assistant chief of operations. “It will have a minimal effect on our response times.”
Fire officials want a firefighter to make sure the vehicle’s path to the road is clear because that firefighter can see things those inside the vehicles can’t. Lack of visibility is one of the factors that led to the accident, according to the police investigating this tragic event.
The victim collapsed outside the garage bay door and was too close for firefighters inside the F-650 paramedic truck to see him. The paramedics jumped into their truck, opened the garage door from the inside, activated their emergency lights, pulled forward – and accidentally ran over the victim.
The new rule should be distributed to firefighters by today, the Chief said. Police are still investigating the accident, while the fire department is conducting its own review.
Police told fire officials that the victim had a blood alcohol level of 0.46 – nearly six times the legal limit. State law in Florida presumes a driver is impaired when the level is 0.08 or more.
The initial 911 callers stated the victim was stumbling, then had fallen, outside fire rescue headquarters. That’s where the paramedics were headed. But he was actually lying in the driveway of the adjacent street, right outside the fire station responding to the call. The victim is in serious condition.
And lest you think I am picking on your profession – I am well aware of the safety record of police vehicles responding to calls – and I am also aware of several incidents where police vehicles ran over people sunning themselves on the beach.
So why am I focusing on this today? I have no clue how many fire stations there are around America – but I know there are over 33,000 fire departments and assuming that most departments have one station – but a bunch of them have multiple stations – I will lowball it and assume that there are someplace around 40,000 fire stations across our Nation.
And I will make another assumption – each of these stations averages 2.5 calls per day. So that is 100,000 runs per day (and now you see why I picked 2.5 – it makes the math much easier), 700,000 runs per week, and multiply that by 52 weeks in a year – and you have 36,400,000 calls per year.
With that volume of runs – do you think that any of the firefighters and paramedics responding from the any of these stations to a call have ever rolled up the door like they did in Florida – and started rolling forward when someone – maybe a citizen or maybe another firefighter – spotted the sleeping drunk and yelled a warning – and the apparatus operator or driver of the van stopped just short of hitting the person?
My guess is that has happened – and my guess is with the number of people who read this site and the experiences over the years – you are very familiar with that “close call” – and perhaps it even involved you or someone on another shift in your station.
When we personally experience such a “close call” – the involved personnel pick up a “memory marker” – something that sticks in our head – and whenever we get involved in a similar event – rolling hot out of the station on a run – there is a little voice screaming in our head “don’t forget to check for the sleeping drunk!”
And when you have such a close call – you learn and the rest of your crew learns and I doubt that anyone with you will ever forget how close you came to killing that person. And maybe you even talk about it over dinner that night – and maybe you even share it with the personnel coming in on the next shift.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to share your “close call” with every firefighter in the world so that a similar event will not happen to them?
“Long, long, time ago” I did my Graduate work at USC in their school of “Safety and Systems Management.” And, during that program I learned about the thoughts and writings of H.W. Heinrich. He posited that there was a numerical relationship between mistakes, mishaps and tragedies. I will not bore you with all the details, but here are some round figures for you to play with in your head.
For every three-hundred mistakes made by a group of people doing the same or similar task (and firefighters around America are such a group), thirty of those mistakes will end up in a mishap (an event with a minor consequence) and one will end up in a tragedy.
And when the tragedy occurs (as it did in the above example out of Florida) everyone learns from this tragedy. It is a good idea to learn from the tragedies. The better idea is to learn from the mishaps. The best idea is to learn from the “close calls”.
Not to bore you, but I wrote my dissertation on this topic “NPCCR – Non Punitive Close Call Reporting” – trying to develop a system where people in “the group” could report their close calls without fear of embarrassment or discipline.
And in 2002 I was presenting at a fire conference and shared my thoughts about NPCCR with that group – and one of the attendees – Chief Billy Goldfeder – approached me afterwards and out of a whole bunch of conversations – www.firefighterclosecalls.com was born.
Many of you are familiar with that site – an open forum where firefighters – people like you, members of the same group – can talk about the “close calls” they have had so that all the other members of the group can pick up the “memory marker” without having to wait for a tragedy.
Neither Chief Goldfeder or I make one nickel from that site – it is not intended to make a profit and there are no ads and no back door deals. And I can tell you that “Billy” spends about six hours a day going through the “incoming” emails and selects and redacts and puts “close calls” on that site for your viewing – and hopefully learning.
Maybe, just maybe if one of the firefighters who in the last year had a “close call” – having nearly run over a drunk sleeping it off in front of a fire station – maybe if that had been reported to FFCC – maybe the involved people in Florida would have read it and avoided the tragedy that they are living through today.
So if you have any “close calls” in your past – please visit that site and let Chief Billy know what almost happened – and you might just save a life.
Thanks for visiting this great site and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Until then, take the time to work safely and if you have a close call – share it with as many people as you can.
Gordon Graham
Co-President, Lexipol
