Traffic Incident Management: Fire Departments Can’t Do Traffic Control Alone
When a vehicle crash or fire, medical emergency, or hazardous materials incident occurs on a road or highway, the local fire department and emergency medical services answer the call. Not responding is not an option. Often, they are the first ones on the scene. Sometimes they are the only emergency personnel on the scene. The police department may be delayed — nowadays they are short-staffed or a further distance away. Safety service patrols are concentrated in mostly urban areas and aren’t available everywhere. Personnel and traffic control equipment from the department of transportation or public works takes time to respond. For years, law enforcement and departments of transportation were designated as responsible for traffic control at roadway incident scenes. Over the past 15 years, that responsibility has slowly transferred to fire departments because they have the largest vehicles. Their personnel and incident victims need physical protection, and fire departments are primed and ready to respond at a moment’s notice.
On arrival at a traffic incident, it is now common for the fire department to park their fire apparatus as a warning and as a barrier for the first line of defense against oncoming traffic. But the fire engine is designed to carry and transport the tools, equipment, and personnel needed to extinguish fires, and rescue people from dangerous situations, not stop tractor-trailer trucks or cars traveling at highway speeds. An ambulance is for the care and transport of injured people, not absorbing the impact of speeding automobiles. When we use those specialty emergency vehicles for blocking at roadway incidents, they are being used for an unintended purpose. When those apparatus get struck by a speeding car, SUV, or fully loaded truck, the lives of firefighters and EMTs at the incident scene are often saved, but those secondary crashes result in damaged or destroyed incredibly expensive specialty vehicles that must then be taken out of service and repaired or replaced. The repair or replacement of specialty fire apparatus often takes months and many times even longer than a year if a replacement rig must be designed, financed, and built. Supply chain issues in 2022 have made repairs more costly and delayed the availability and delivery of repair parts. Those secondary crashes often also result in injuries to emergency personnel and civilians involved in the initial incident. Those injuries can sometimes be life-changing partial or permanent disabilities like amputations and traumatic brain injuries. The fire departments, municipalities, and ultimately the citizens pay for the damaged fire apparatus, the cost of treatment of injuries, and the lost work time for injured workers. The community suffers when the fire department does not have its full complement of emergency vehicles, equipment, and personnel.
Fire departments, and especially volunteer fire departments operating on shoestring budgets, can no longer shoulder the burden of damaged or destroyed equipment and/or injured firefighters alone any longer. Fire departments have been put in the position of having to protect their personnel at roadway incidents because no other agency is there to do it in many situations. Some fire departments are routinely being asked to respond their emergency apparatus to non-emergency scenes just to provide “blocking” with fire apparatus that was never designed for traffic incident management. The current situation is not sustainable. We cannot continue to ask the fire service to do traffic control alone with fewer firefighters, strained budgets, and apparatus and equipment that was never designed or intended to be used to physically protect emergency scenes from speeding cars and trucks. Fire departments have been positioning their fire apparatus in blocking positions out of necessity to protect emergency personnel and the victims of the initial roadway incident. There must be a better way.
The Emergency Responder Safety Institute (ERSI) believes that four strategies will more evenly distribute the responsibility and associated costs for protecting road and highway incident scenes nationwide, across all responding agencies.
Purpose-built traffic management vehicles. Specialty vehicles that are designed to warn oncoming motorists and protect incident work areas are needed for quick response to road and highway incidents. Fire departments should not be expected to pay for, or staff these specialty vehicles, although there are numerous examples of fire department traffic control vehicles around the country. The overall costs should be shared by all response agencies. ERSI has been studying purpose-built traffic control vehicles and recommending their use as a model for years. We published a report and produced an online, free, training module specifically about fire department-based traffic control vehicles (Note 1 & 2). There are several examples around the country of repurposed fire apparatus and heavy traffic control vehicles that include truck-mounted attenuators. We only know of one example where the cost for a purpose-built, emergency traffic control vehicle was shared by the fire department, local road commission, and the state department of transportation: Grand Rapids (MI) Fire Dept. Utility 2 is a specially designed and equipped dump truck with a large directional arrow device and an attenuator trailer. The Grand Rapids Fire Department (GRFD) partnered with the Kent County Road Commission and the Michigan Department of Transportation to repurpose a public works dump truck into a traffic control unit named “Utility 2”. The truck was designed, acquired, equipped, and staffed after three secondary crashes where front-line fire apparatus were struck while positioned at highway incidents, resulting in over $150,000 in damage and months of the fire units being out of service. The used dump truck, acquired from the Grand Rapids Water Department, was modified to function specifically as a blocking and traffic control vehicle. It was repainted as a fire department vehicle, equipped with emergency warning lights, high visibility florescent and reflective graphics, a full-sized arrow device, and an MDOT-funded attenuator trailer. The overall cost was less than $10,000. GRFD houses, staffs, maintains, updates, and responds Utility 2 to various roadway incidents in and around Grand Rapids, and sometimes assists neighboring fire departments who do not have similar vehicles in their fleet. GRFD’s Utility 2 model is one example of what we need in terms of collaborative and cooperative arrangements between agencies. Fire departments need other traffic incident management team members including law enforcement, transportation, and public works agencies to step up and assist by providing, staffing, and responding emergency traffic control vehicles specially designed to manage traffic and protect highway incident scenes. The alternative would be to collaborate and coordinate financial resources for fire departments to design, acquire, equip, train, staff, and respond specialty purpose-built traffic control vehicles for emergency response to highway incidents nationwide. Fire departments already have plenty of responsibilities at highway incidents including patient care, hazard control, fire suppression, extrication of trapped victims, and control of hazardous materials. Most fire departments would prefer to have any other agency respond in a timely manner to provide temporary traffic control at roadway incidents with properly designed, equipped, and staffed traffic control vehicles to protect the incident scene, the victims, the emergency personnel, and the very expensive specialty fire and rescue apparatus and other emergency vehicles (ex. Police cars, ambulances, tow trucks) working the incident.
Cooperative agreements and action that truly shares the traffic control responsibility. Traffic control responsibilities need to be shared by responding agencies. Each community must develop a plan for doing this with all response agencies participating. We can achieve this collaboration through TIM Committees that have proven to be effective in many areas. If other agencies cannot provide traffic control services in a timely manner at incident scenes, then fire departments should collaborate with transportation, public works, law enforcement, and other local agencies to fund and acquire purpose-built traffic control vehicles. Those traffic control vehicles should be stocked with temporary traffic control equipment acquired through cost-sharing that also facilitates rapid responses with trained personnel 24/7/365. Right now, some fire departments are taking on that responsibility and cost by themselves without support from any other agencies. It should be a team effort.
Funding. The cost of using fire apparatus as blocking vehicles at incident scenes is severely impacting fire departments financially and in emergency response capabilities. Fire and EMS departments are footing the bill and providing the service using volunteer personnel in many areas, while other agencies simply say, “we don’t have the funding, or we don’t have the necessary staff”. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if fire departments used the same excuse? The $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act might provide an opportunity to finance purpose-built emergency traffic control vehicles and provide for more timely and effective temporary traffic management for emergency incident scenes nationwide.
Digital alerting. ERSI has been working on the issue of roadway incident safety since 1998. Despite all the time, energy, and effort dedicated to developing and distributing responder safety training, traffic control procedures, and traffic incident management best practices, emergency responder struck-by-vehicle injury, and fatality numbers are increasing! We shudder to think what the loss numbers would be if all the training and advocacy work completed in the past 24 years had not been done to teach emergency personnel how to best protect themselves. Almost everything that traffic incident management training and best practices have promoted and implemented to protect roadway incident scenes uses visual cues including large blocking emergency vehicles, flashing warning lights, high-visibility vehicle graphics, personal protective equipment, road cones, advance warning signs, flares, and variable message signs. All of these measures require motorists to watch for these warnings and then react properly (Move over, slow down) for them to be effective. The most common causal problem of these struck-by-vehicle incidents is that “D-Drivers” are not looking out the windshield to see these measures as they travel down the road at highway speeds. Drivers involved in secondary crashes involving emergency vehicles and personnel sometimes tell us that they didn’t see the temporary traffic controls or the emergency vehicle with flashing warning lights. A new tool or approach is needed to get the attention of drivers. Digital alerting technology with audible in-vehicle warnings is different. Drivers don’t have to be looking at a screen to get an audible alert when it’s available. Equipping emergency vehicles with the necessary transponders and requiring all new vehicles to have the capability to receive digital alerts is another way to get critical advance warnings to distracted, drunk, drowsy, and disgruntled drivers.
Better and more effective collaboration, cooperation, and coordination between all responding agencies are needed to implement these strategies with the goal of providing better traffic management response, advance warning, and blocking at roadway incident scenes. Fire departments can no longer do this alone. Temporary traffic controls are necessary at incident scenes on all roads and highways, at any and all times of day, or night. Appropriate, purpose-built, equipped, financed, and staffed traffic incident response vehicles that respond promptly 24/7/365 everywhere are needed to protect emergency responders and everyday motorists. Fire departments can’t do traffic control alone anymore!
This editorial was authored by Jack Sullivan, Director of Training, Emergency Responder Safety Institute.
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(1) Hardening Blocking Vehicles for Traffic Incidents and Planned Special Events