Thursday, January 16, 2014

Do NOT Do This At Home

This is serious business, folks. No one responding to an accident or emergency wants to be responsible for taking a life of someone they could be rescuing, but we see here it does happen.

This is on my radar because we recently conducted a drill out where I work and saw an incident where a driver responding to the emergency was driving too fast and not responding to visual direction given by another to slow down a s the vehicle approached the drill site.

This is a concern not only for the potential of hitting someone, but also in not paying attention to someone on the ground who has a better grasp of the immediate situation and who could help the driver avoid, say, driving through a spill of radioactive waste and thus turning the rescue vehicle into part of the contamination that has to be cleaned up.


None of us are perfect – I know I constantly have things I have to improve about my emergency response performance. This is why we practice, and why we have drills. I’m certain this driver will be much more situationally aware and not let the emergency get the better of him or her during the next drill. That is precisely why we practice, so we can identify deficiencies in our performance.

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