The last few days of July have been extremely busy for members of the Emergency Response Safety Institute. A number of us spent a great deal of time laboring on your behalf. A working committee met at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Dr. Denis Onieal, Superintendent of the National Fire Academy extended the hospitality of the academy for a group of dedicated people who gave of their time and talents to work on our highway safety project.

Many of us have been working on this project for the better part of three years now. We set some lofty goals for ourselves back in 2001. We have made some great gains. But the time has come to move to the next level. Our group has created the model standard operating procedures, and, with the kind assistance of the folks at VFIS, has produced an excellent video on highway. You cannot rest on your laurels in the safety business.

Jack Sullivan and Ron Moore have worked extremely hard in delivering a number of highway safety courses around the country. As a group, we have climbed to a new plateau. The time has come to move on up to the next level of success. So it was that our group met at Emmitsburg to begin the next round of climbing.

If our highway safety effort is to succeed, we have to create a program that can be taught to you, the end user and ultimate customer. We have taken the first steps to create the curriculum for a series of courses that can be delivered around the country. Our group is in the beginning stages of developing the criteria for instructor selection and development.

We know that a small group of selected instructors could never accomplish the lofty goal of insuring that every fire, police, and EMS person in our country is exposed to our safety message. However, we also recognize that some people may not be qualified to do what we need to do. To that end our group is working to create the way in which instructors will be selected for delivering our programs.

It is critical to insure that there is a certain passion for this issue among the people who serve as our instructors. The person teaching the safety program must be sold on safety as a critical issue.

There are so many other important issues that tie directly back into what we are seeking to do. Creating the curriculum for what we intend to do, is our first major issue. A significant body of time was spent during our meeting reviewing the currently available courses that address highway safety-related training. A surprisingly great amount of work has been performed by a number of really fine folks.

VFIS has been a leader in our efforts. Their generous support has given us our Highway Safety for Emergency Responders video. Mike Young, Director of Fire Programs for VFIS demonstrated the new program created by his firm. It allows for a PowerPoint program to be delivered that can now be supplemented by an interactive tool to allow for the creation of case studies of importance to the students.

Jack Sullivan, ERSI Director of Training spoke on the program that he created to share the lessons learned from tragedies he has encountered. Ron Moore, Chief Instructor for ERSI, presented the PowerPoint program that he has developed to address the problems he has encountered over the past several years. Mike Ziegler, representing the Maryland Fire Rescue Institute spoke to their course offerings that deal with highway safety and fire police training.

In order to create a product that will be understandable by the emergency service world, we decided to model our programs according to the generally accepted sequence of awareness, operational, and technician levels. A committee was created to develop a highway safety awareness-training program. Headed by Dr. Robert Fleming of Rowan University, the team members will be reviewing existing resources for inclusion to the greatest extent possible. This will be the first of a sequential series of course that will impact this issue at the lowest possible, street-related level, and then move up sequentially to the higher managerial levels.

We do not want to reinvent any wheels. That is why we are looking at all of the existing programs that we can identify. Wherever possible, we will blend these things together in the most effective and easily understood format possible.

Rest assured that progress is being made. While it might not seem that a lot is happening on any given day, we are making headway. We must, for you see people are being injured and are dying every week. Stay with us as we climb to the next level of success.