 In this module, we are going to focus on one of the more hazardous aspects of our job that is often overlooked. Operating motor vehicles account for about 23% of the wildland firefighter fatalities per year. A report published back in 1999 that looked at wildland fire fatalities from 1990 to 1998 showed us that during that time period, burnovers accounted for more wildland firefighter fatalities than any other cause. Now that has changed. In August of 2007, a second report was released that analyzed data from 1990 to 2006. This new report shows that vehicle accidents and aircraft accidents are now the leading cause of fire line fatalities. To address this issue, we visited people that inherently spend a lot of time trying to decrease their number of accidents and consistently train and practice driving defensively. First, we talked to some folks from structural fire departments. Rob Christiansen started his career in the wildland fire community before transferring to the North Ada County Fire Department in Idaho. 25% of all accidents or all injuries and all deaths are attributed from motor vehicle accidents and emergency vehicles. And some of that number is just returning back to the station. So it's the responsibility for that driver not to only get us there to do what he needs to do to keep us safe, but to get us back here to the station safely without any accidents. It's a huge responsibility and one that shouldn't be taken lightly. A lot of those, a lot of that number or the bulk of that number can be fixed through education, proper driver classes like vehicle awareness, evasive maneuvers, things of that nature. Oftentimes with seasonals, when I was a hotshot member, it would be the person that was awake the most and felt like they can get us down the hill. So we'd throw them in the mod and down the winding single lane dirt road we'd go in the dark. I think driver selection needs to be very critical. Don't just find somebody that's had their license the longest. That's not what I'm saying. Find somebody that is safety conscious, okay. Find somebody that wants to learn, find somebody that takes ownership and doing a good job, having a clean cab, making sure that things in back are fastened down or nettings over some of the loose gear. Find somebody that knows their vehicle. They know that pre-trip inspections are important every day. Even in October, when the season's almost over and you've been on the job for your fifth 14-day tour in a row, somebody is going to not sacrifice speed for a shortcut that may cost somebody in the long run. Another firefighter that started out in the wildland fire community before moving to a municipal fire department was Betsy Lange. Betsy worked as an engine operator and also ran the North Star Hot Shot crew in Alaska. She is now an engine driver in New Mexico working for the Albuquerque Fire Department. As she talks about her experience in training, try to think of ways that your local unit can build upon and improve your current driver training programs. My job is to get the crew there. I don't have to worry about what goes on when I get there. These guys are going to do most of the work there. My job is to get them there safely. If I can't get them there safely, they're not going to do the work. So from the moment I get the dispatch, I don't even hear what kind of call it is. I'm getting the address. I'm getting the fire box. I'm committed to getting us there as safely and as quickly as possible with emphasis on the safety. In the city, we take defensive driving very seriously because we have so many more cars. So many people who aren't paying attention. Their music's loud. They're talking on their cell phones. And so we need to be real aware of that. My number one job is firefighter, but more importantly, I'm the driver that gets all the firefighters there. When I was a driver in a four-service engine, traffic wasn't on our minds. We're on back roads. We usually never saw another vehicle. So it just wasn't part of our thinking. But now most of our firefighting is urban interface. And so there's going to be traffic no matter where you drive, no matter what kind of engine you're driving. The city of Albuquerque requires that you have a class E license and that you go to a certification course first. It's a two-week course. When I took it, it was a week course. I've extended it to two weeks. You go through detail training, how to operate the engine, and then you have to get 20 hours of driving before you can ever get certified. In the wildland, I think I would require a defensive driving course before anybody even got into a vehicle and be familiar with the truck in a parking lot, in an area with no traffic. But mostly that defensive driving class, you can get your mindset set on the safety that's involved. A defensive driver in my mind is one who's got their mind on the traffic, on what is happening, what could be happening, getting the big picture, looking around, expecting the unexpected. Just not letting your mind wander to what the rest of the crew is doing, not letting your mind wander to the scene that you're going to go to, but focused on getting that crew there safely. So defensive driving is a mindset. So the training I get in class does turn over to my personal vehicle because you can't turn it on and turn it off when you get to work. You're either a defensive driver, a safe driver, or you're not. And when you get behind the wheel of a huge big red truck, if you're not safe already, your crew's going to be in trouble. You can't drive a large vehicle like that safely if your mindset isn't there. I think that mindset's good for any driver in your personal vehicle because if you don't get to where you're going, you're useless. You can't do your job. And with the more and more cars and the more urban settings out there, you just have to be cognizant of traffic, of defensive driving, of the driving conditions, what's going on out there. That's the main purpose of the driver is to get that vehicle there. You have to make yourself have that mind for safety. You have to make yourself remember why you're getting paid to do what you do, get your crew there safely. In the private sector, one business that is exposed to a lot of driving time is United Parcel Service. UPS looks very closely at all their accidents, not from the perspective of whose fault it was, but rather was the accident avoidable or not. This attitude may serve us well in the wildland fire community. To talk about this, we went to visit Joe Darden. Joe was a UPS driver for almost 12 years and he's been in the transportation industry for over 17 years. He now owns his own company that teaches defensive driving techniques. His training package was recently approved by Federal Express. Let's listen to what he has to say. A little bit of my background, I started at UPS as a loader and then after being a loader for a couple years, I drove for 11 and a half years and then I became a trainer, so I trained drivers at UPS for about two years, then ended up actually as a center manager running a center at UPS again focusing on driver safety and what it takes to keep the driver safe when they're behind the wheel. After about 17 and a half years in the transportation industry, I decided I wanted to start my own company and really focus on driver safety and what I could do to keep people safer and so that's how Joe Darden Group came about. Defensive driving is important because that's what keeps you as a driver safe from the mistakes that other people make when they're out there on the road. You could be the best driver in the world, but if you're not paying attention to what other people are out there doing, sooner or later that's going to come back to bite you and you're going to be impacted by a poor decision that somebody else makes. And defensive driving is what keeps that from happening. If you're involved in a crash, it doesn't necessarily have to be your fault. You're still involved in a crash. You don't want to always ask whenever there is a crash and you're looking at it, is it whose fault was it? You want to ask yourself what could have been done differently to avoid this crash or could this crash ever have been avoided, period? That's the question. If you can answer no to that question, then you as a driver have done everything you can. If there was no way possible for you to avoid that crash. What you find when you start asking that question though is there's very few instances where the answer is no. Usually the answer is yes. I could have avoided this crash because X. If I wasn't driving 10 miles an hour over the speed limit, I would have been able to stop sooner. Or if I hadn't been tailgating the vehicle in front of me when they ran into the car in front of them, I wouldn't have ran into the back of that car because I would have had a good following distance and I could have either avoided that situation or come to a stop before I ran into the back of that vehicle. So then you get into, well, how does that impact me as a driver? Well, if I'm a driver and I run into the back of somebody and I get in a crash for whatever reason or I go through an intersection without looking at that intersection before I get into it to make sure that somebody's not running a red light or whatever, I get into that intersection. Somebody runs a red light. It's that driver's fault. If you want to place blame, if I get injured, my body couldn't care less who's fault it is. I'm still injured, so I'm involved in a crash. My body's injured and now I'm the one who has to suffer and go through the rehabilitation and everything that if I had been driving more defensively even though that person was causing the crash, I could have looked as they came down that street and never had any intention of stopping, stopped even though I had a green light and just watched them blow through the intersection or whatever at that point, but at least I'm not recuperating in a hospital or worst case scenario dead and now my family's going on without me because of something somebody else did that I could have prevented if I'd been more defensive when I was out there driving. In your student workbooks, you will find the highlights of the system Joe uses in his defensive driving classes. Joe is a true professional when it comes to defensive driving, so let's listen closely as he introduces you to what is called the smart system. And so smart is an acronym obviously, SMART and each one of the letters stands for a different thing you're doing in whatever part of the defensive driving system you're going through. So the S is study. So you're studying what's going on around the vehicle among other things, but that's really the key point. Study what's going on, what's going to impact me or what's likely to impact me. So you're looking around your vehicle all the time. To maintain, we talk about maintaining a safe following distance. That's a huge part of it. Maintaining situational awareness is another part of it. Maintaining that idea of what's going to happen around my vehicle as I approach intersections. So how do I make sure that I don't get into an intersection and I'm so close behind the vehicle in front of me that I don't see they're running a red light and now I'm in an intersection and the light's been red. So that safe following distance when you're driving your vehicle, a safe following distance when you're parked in traffic so that if you get rear-ended, you don't get pushed into the car in front of you or if the car in front of you stalls, you've got enough room to drive around that vehicle without having to put your vehicle in reverse in traffic. Those are two key points of maintaining that safe distance between you and the vehicle in front of you. The anticipate what we talked about is trying to anticipate what's likely to happen as you approach intersections, what's likely to happen whenever you're behind the wheel of a vehicle with other road users. So you're looking at what indicators am I getting? What kind of communication am I getting from other road users? Are there turn signals on? Are there people swerving in their lane? Is there somebody that's coming up to an intersection and it looks like they're going to try to beat the light? Any of those types of things, you're trying to anticipate what is that person likely to do based on what I can see from the visual cues they're giving me? It's not predicting what they're going to do because you can't really predict. It's trying to anticipate it based on the cues that you're getting. And if you're doing the visual search right and you're looking for those cues, the more you do that, the better you're going to be at anticipating that. I always try to say, you want to anticipate a worst-case scenario and that way all your surprises will be pleasant ones. We get to the respond, the R part of it, and you want to respond to what you see then. If I see that somebody's swerving over or somebody looks like they're going to run through that intersection, my response typically is going to be, well, I'm going to slow down, make sure that I can try to establish eye-to-eye contact with that person, establish eye-to-eye contact with anybody else that's on the roadway to make sure not only am I seeing what they've got in mind, but I'm better communicating what it is that I'm going to do when I get to that intersection or as I'm driving down the road. So responding to what we see when we're studying things, responding to what we anticipate. When we anticipate something, and that actually is what happens, our response then is to typically slow down or move into another lane, take that path of least resistance, do whatever it takes to keep our vehicle safe. And then the last one is the T, the train. And the train is typically just what we're doing right now. We're talking about driving safely. We're talking about defensive driving, working with drivers to let them know that it's their responsibility, anytime they're behind the wheel of a vehicle, to keep that vehicle safe, to keep themselves safe, keep anybody else that's in the vehicle with them safe. When they're driving down the road, what they should be thinking about is, how do I get from where I am right now to where my destination is without being involved in a crash? What am I looking at out here? What's likely to happen? What kind of threats are out here to me? Actively searching for those things that can cause a crash or that can impact me as a driver that now all of a sudden not only am I involved in a crash, but now somebody's injured or somebody's killed. Whether or not it was technically my fault, how could I have avoided that? And so it never happened. And the more people do that, they're training all the time. So they're consistently, they're constantly training. They're training consistently. So they're developing a habit. Every time I stop, I've got a good distance between the vehicle in front of me and my vehicle. Anytime that distance isn't there, it makes me uncomfortable because my habit is to have that distance established. Anytime I'm driving down the road and I'm not at least six seconds behind the vehicle in front of me, if I'm two or three seconds behind the vehicle, I'm uncomfortable and I realize now I can't see as far down the road as I used to because I'm so close to this vehicle, all my world now is on what this person in front of me does. If they decide to slam on their brakes, I have to slam on my brakes and I'm going to run into the back of them. So always trying to establish these routines of doing it the same way each time is what train is really about. You want to train consistently. You want to train constantly and you want to train carefully. By now, the wildland fire community is very familiar with the term situational awareness. The essay we talk about in fire seems to coincide well with the S and the A in the smart system. But how do we maintain good essay study and anticipate when driving when so many distractions are being thrown at us during fire operations? To look into this, we talk to a smoke jumper pilot. Essay has been a big part of aviation operations for a long time. There are even regulations that require pilots to adhere to a sterile cockpit rule that limits distractions during certain periods of flight. Let's listen to a pilot tell us about his role as a pilot and how situational awareness is applied in an aircraft cockpit. And then let's see if any of these concepts can be applied to the cab of the vehicle. Well, my primary duty is flying this airplane. And driving is a collateral duty for almost everyone in our business. And maybe that's the reason that we don't take it as seriously as we should. My mindset when I'm flying this airplane is that I've got a task to do and it requires all my concentration. And for instance, if I had forgotten to turn my cell phone off and it rang in my pocket and I felt it buzzing in there and I was in the aircraft, it wouldn't even... there's not a remote chance that I would react to that. Should you be any more cavalier driving a car than when you're operating an airplane? I don't think so. The hazards, the statistics show that we lose more firefighters traveling to fires in vehicles than we do in the fire environment themselves. When you're operating your personal vehicle or a government vehicle traveling for business or pleasure, maybe we should have a sterile cockpit sort of attitude. There's no way it's not an enforceable law but the statistics show that it's a dangerous thing that we do. And I would say you could make a good argument that a lot of incidents in vehicles as well as aircraft are because you're thinking about something you shouldn't have been. You had lost your concentration. I think that when I'm flying a plane complacency is one of my biggest enemies and that's why when I pull out on the runway I'm thinking about if something went wrong how would I react? And I do that each and every takeoff. In an automobile I don't know that we do that. Let's say you're headed down the road pretty straight, pretty flat good visibility, dry roads got it on cruise control things are good, the radio's playing. If you're on a two-lane road which we oftentimes are there's vehicles traveling going to miss you by four or five feet at a closure speed of up to 150 miles an hour. Hurdling by as you're there in that fog we need to during those times and I know, I mean that sounds like a dangerous thing and I think it is but we need to be aware what if that vehicle comes into my lane what's my out then? What if I had a blowout would I be able to keep it out of that lane? Would I be able to keep it out of the ditch? We need to pay attention and kind of think about the worst case. We found an article published in the United Kingdom that attempts to transfer the concept of pilot situational awareness into the minds of vehicle operators an abbreviated version of this article is provided in your student workbooks please get into your groups read the article and complete the next exercise.