Who’s Really Liable?
DEPARTMENTS
EDITOR’S OPINION
Responding and returning, one of the categories in which firefighter death and injury statistics are recorded annually, is one of our most frustrating lists because it can be so easily controlled and reduced by department policy, accountability, education, training, and enforcement within today’s fire service.
Since working with the National Fire Academy’s Firefighter Safety and Survival Course and more recently with the New York State Chiefs Association on safety awareness, I have heard story after story from committee members and attendees of injury and near-miss, death-threatening accidents to firefighters responding to and returning from alarms. Each time the scenarios of firefighters riding in unsafe positions, sudden and swift apparatus movements, and speeding over jolting road hazards were similar. Each time the accompanying nods indicated that the individual costly lesson had been learned.
But it is not enough!
The figures for 1985 show that the firefighter death rate in the responding and returning category is still unacceptably high. Firefighter Sandy Lee of Prince George’s County, MD, has been courageous in relating “Sandy’s Story” throughout the nation of her personal fire response tragedy, and it has had a major impact on safety awareness of responding firefighters. More recently, a very costly lesson was learned in the courtrooms of Massachusetts when severely injured Firefighter Joe Tynan’s case was settled “out of court” for $4.8-million.
The costly lesson in this case was laid at the feet of an apparatus manufacturer who did not provide sufficient handholds for firefighters riding in unsafe positions.
It causes me to wonder, are incidents like this the fault of manufacturers who must react to the demands of in-house, apparatus committees’specification lists? Is it the absence of a safety policy set forth by municipal government? Or is it the lack of accountability of the fire officer to his men and his department, or the lack of accountability of the firefighter to himself and his family?
Laying the burden of guilt on the apparatus manufacturer and his insurance coverage is just as irresponsible as failure to provide and enforce safe riding positions. It’s ridiculous to design safety into unsafe acts. It is surely more effective to eliminate the act and thereby the statistic.
The insurance settlement in Massachusetts is a “no win” lesson for all of us—all, that is, except a law firm whose phone number is in the pocket of every firefighter.
