BY WARNER R. WINBORNE
Every firefighter understands that a scene size-up requires a 360° assessment, including a careful and critical observation of conditions as they exist. Most, if not all, of us have responded to incidents in which the conditions appear radically different, depending on your point of view. One side of a structure might show light smoke from the eaves, while the other side has fire blowing out of a window. Similarly, we are all familiar with incidents that pre-sent spectacular conditions and eye-popping images worthy of the evening news broadcast. These scenes require particular discipline from the incident commander; it is all too easy to develop tunnel vision and miss the bigger picture.
Hasty judgments based on incomplete information will certainly lead to bad decisions, inefficiency, and unnecessary risk taking. Yet hasty judgments are precisely what we are making when it comes to the issue of vehicle-related firefighter line-of-duty deaths (LODDs). All too often, we seem to be entranced by the spectacular (and senseless) loss of life when apparatus are operated recklessly or thoughtlessly.
As a case in point, consider the example of Amarillo (TX) Fire Department Firefighter Christopher Brian Hunton, who on April 23, 2005, was ejected from his rig while responding to a call. Two days later, he died from his injuries. In all likelihood, had Hunton been wearing his seat belt, he would be alive today. In response to this incident, the fire service has launched a massive campaign to reduce the number of vehicular LODDs. Such campaigns, including the national seat belt pledge, have garnered the support of the United States Fire Administration (USFA), the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the National Volunteer Fire Council, and many others. Their desire to reduce LODDs is commendable. But the underlying assumption here, as one supporter put it, is that “our dysfunctional fire service seat belt culture is the root cause of Brian’s death.” Based on this assumption, the fire service is mobilizing and expending resources to change this dysfunctional culture and ensure that “everyone goes home.” This is a noble goal.
AN UNTESTED ASSUMPTION?
However, in addition to being a volunteer firefighter, I am also a social scientist, a professor of government. As an academic, I am trained to be skeptical of assumptions based on a single incident, such as the regrettable death of Hunton. But a single instance does not prove a point; it is the equivalent of making command decisions based on observing only one side of a structure. So I am struck by our rapid, knee-jerk reaction to Hunton’s death.
Although the goal of reducing LODDs is laudable and vehicle-related LODDs seem to be the easiest to avoid, the underlying untested assumption is that our culture is dysfunctional and that firefighters are especially reckless in operating motor vehicles. Is it true that the fire service suffers from a dysfunctional culture of recklessness behind the wheel? The example of Hunton would suggest so, but was he the rule or the exception? If his death was indeed an aberration, it would be folly to spend our resources to correct a problem that does not exist in an attempt to prevent similar deaths. Yet that is precisely what we are doing.
In addition, I come from a department that is short on resources, a true volunteer department that has to depend on the generosity of our community for every dime that we spend. As such, I always wonder if we spend the money wisely. Is our spending effective in helping us to meet our goals? Are there other ways we might spend our money to achieve the same result? Are there other goals, perhaps not as grand as reducing LODDs, that are both achievable and affordable? It makes no sense to spend time, effort, and money on goals that we cannot reasonably reach, no matter how lofty they are. It is better to aim at more modest but achievable goals instead.
EXAMINING THE DATA
To answer the question of whether a reckless driving culture plagues the fire service, I looked at data from 2004, the most recent year in which I could find both fire service and highway safety data. In 2004, there were 117 firefighter LODDs. Of these, vehicle crashes were considered the cause of fatal injury in 20 cases. These numbers are rather typical. Firefighter fatalities average a little more than 100 per year and have been consistent at that rate, except for 2001. Likewise, vehicular deaths typically account for about one-fifth of the total. So 2004 appears to be a fairly typical year, although the number of fatalities was a bit high in 2004 and the total attributable to vehicle crashes a bit low. Up to 2004, the 10-year average for annual LODDs was 110 (correcting for 9/11) and 22.5 for vehicular deaths. On the surface, it seems that vehicular causes account for a sizeable proportion of firefighter deaths and that reducing or eliminating vehicular deaths would go a long way in reducing the total LODDs.
But if we look more closely at the 2004 data, we find that of these 20 vehicular fatalities, four involved airplanes or helicopters and only 16 firefighters died in motor vehicle crashes. Of these, half died while driving personally owned vehicles. Seven of these eight were volunteer firefighters. Most of them were young, inexperienced drivers; only one of these volunteers was over the age of 20. Of the eight total deaths involving personally owned vehicles, only one driver was known to be wearing a seat belt at the time.
Clearly, these firefighters would have profited by heeding the warnings heard so often now around the firehouse. But although slowing down and buckling up would likely have saved some of these members, none of these firefighters were operating or riding in an emergency vehicle. There is no reason to blame the fire serviceand certainly not the company officersfor these deaths, as some would have it. Indeed, considering that seven of the eight were still teenagers, it is more reasonable to blame their deaths on youth and inexperience rather than on a pervasive culture of reckless driving within the fire service. In 2004, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death for those ages 15 to 20. It is more reasonable to conclude that reckless driving is common among teenagers than to assume that reckless driving is common among firefighters.
FIREFIGHTER VS. CIVILIAN DEATHS
So that leaves eight fatalities in 2004 attributable to emergency motor vehicle operation. Unfortunately, we are not very likely to reduce this number at all; it seems that we are so attuned to the dangers of the fireground that we forget the dangers of merely driving down the road. Every year, firefighters log millions of miles on the road, and eventually these miles will catch up to us. In 2004, civilian highway fatalities occurred at the rate of 1.44 per 100 million miles traveled, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). It seems reasonable that firefighters should suffer a comparable fatality rate merely from driving on the road. Any evidence of a fatality rate above that of civilians would support the assumption that we are reckless risk takers when responding in emergency vehicles. But a fatality rate at or below that of civilians would indicate that emergency vehicle operators drive just as safely as civilians, even when they are responding to and from an emergency scene. Further, should the rate of firefighter fatalities approximate that of civilians, it would suggest that any attempt to further reduce that fatality rate is unlikely to be very productive.
But the comparison is not so easily made. The NHTSA reports fatalities per 100 million miles driven. The USFA reports the number of firefighter fatalities by vehicular causes but does not report the number of miles driven, a necessary statistic to make the comparison between civilians and the fire service.
So how many miles did we drive? Because there is no data on the number of miles emergency vehicles travel in the line of duty, we have to estimate this figure. To arrive at this estimate, we have to make two assumptions. The first is how many emergency vehicles we would assign on an average call. At my station, it is not uncommon to send three vehicles. A call to a motor vehicle accident might get only two pieces out, while a working structure fire might get as many as five from my station. My guess is that career departments would see similar rates, roughly three vehicles per call.
The second assumption is the distance to the call. In my unusually large district of almost 75 square miles, some addresses are 15 miles from the firehouse. In addition, we provide automatic mutual aid to structure fires in the neighboring districts, and a substantial number of our calls are mutual aid. In our case, we likely drive an average of 10 miles to the call. But considering that my district is unusual, let’s assume that the average distance to the call for departments nationwide is five miles. For those in urban areas, this number is likely to be on the high side; for those in the country, it is rather low. Now all we need to know are the number of calls in 2004.
The USFA reported that there were 1,550,500 fires in the United States in 2004. It also reported that fire calls accounted for only 8.2 percent of all calls. Doing the simple math, we find that fire departments responded to 18.9 million calls in 2004. If we drove five miles to the call and five miles back, and we drove three vehicles, each call would mean 30 miles on the road. This would mean that fire departments drove roughly 567 million miles in 2004. If civilians suffered vehicle fatalities at the rate of 1.44 per 100 million miles traveled, we could expect firefighters, driving the miles they do, to suffer 8.16 fatalities. And in 2004, there were eight firefighter fatalities that occurred in emergency vehicles. Critics might charge that my assumptions were made merely to make the math work out properly. I assure you, my assumptions about miles traveled were made before I calculated the number of fatalities we could expect. Regardless, it is clear that we routinely drive hundreds of millions of miles each year, and that will inevitably lead to vehicular fatalities.
In short, it appears that firefighters driving emergency response vehicles are no more or less likely than the average driver to be involved in a fatal vehicle crash. The claim from the anecdotal evidence of Brian Hunton, that ours is a culture of reckless abandon when behind the wheel of an emergency vehicle, does not survive scrutiny, at least not when applied to emergency vehicle responses, as was the case with Hunton. His example, rather than demonstrating a dysfunctional culture, should remind us that, like so many things we encounter as firefighters, driving itself is dangerous and may even be fatal.
Of course, it is true that firefighters should buckle up and that emergency vehicles should slow down. All apparatus should come to a complete stop at stoplights and stop signs before proceeding through the intersection. All of this is true. It is tragic that Hunton was not buckled into his seat. Had he been restrained, he likely would be alive today. But the data indicate that spending time and money to reduce fatalities in emergency vehicles is unlikely to produce tangible results, since firefighters are no more reckless than civilians, even though we drive to a fire while they drive to work. The law of diminishing returns would suggest that we are unlikely to reduce vehicular LODDs in any appreciable amount, no matter how much time, money, and effort we spend.
Moreover, broader social, legal, and technological changes are likely to have the intended effect of making emergency vehicle operation safer. Mandatory seat belt laws are in effect in every state but New Hampshire, and the evidence is clear that mandatory-use laws increase seat belt use. The National Occupant Protection Use Survey, conducted biennially since 1994, documents an increase in observed seat-belt use from a rate of 58 percent in 1994 to 71 percent in 2000, to 83 percent today, where we seem to have peaked. Although we have anecdotal evidence of firefighters not buckling up, whether in emergency vehicles or in personally owned vehicles, clearly the broader trend is toward increased use of seat belts, and we can only expect the general habit of buckling up to be replicated in an emergency vehicle. Furthermore, apparatus is being equipped with sensors that activate visual and audible alarms when a seat is occupied but the seat belt is not buckled. Such mechanical measures, in tandem with broader public measures to encourage seat belt use, call into question the wisdom and necessity of additional programs and measures to remind firefighters to buckle up.
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Finally, there is convincing evidence that this general increase in seat belt usage is saving lives and that as a result, from year to year, there are fewer lives that could have been saved by the use of a seat belt. The NHTSA reported that in 1975, seat belts saved only 978 lives although 13,301 more lives could have been saved by wearing a seat belt. Thirty years later, the NHTSA reports that in 2005, seat belts saved 15,632 and only 5,382 more lives would have been saved by seat belts (Figure 1). To look at it another way: In 1975, for every life saved by a seat belt, 13 more lives could have been saved. By 2005, for every three lives saved by a seat belt, one more life might have been saved.
I am not opposed to driver training programs. Obviously, we need to practice defensive driving any time we are behind the wheel, whether in an emergency vehicle or the family sedan. But it is the younger, less-experienced drivers who are at particular risk for aggressive or otherwise reckless driving, and company officers would be well advised to keep a close watch on them. However, there is no evidence of a larger, dysfunctional culture that promotes recklessness behind the wheel of an emergency vehicle. On the contrary, emergency vehicle operators suffer no greater fatality rate than all other drivers. But fixated on the spectacle of vehicular death, like a rubbernecker on the highway, we fail to see the bigger picture a more careful and thorough size-up would reveal. Quite simply, we are squandering resources to address a risk that is neither great nor easily mitigated. We would be much better served using those resources in a fashion that is more likely to produce real results.
WARNER R. WINBORNE is associate professor of government and foreign affairs at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and a volunteer with the Hampden-Sydney (VA) Volunteer Fire Department.
