Emergency Vehicle Safety Initiative

Book excerpt: As traffic volume increases and the highway and interstate system becomes more complex, emergency responders face a growing risk to their personal safety while managing and working at highway incidents. The purpose of this report is to identify practices that have the potential to decrease that risk, as well as to reduce the number of injuries and deaths that occur while responding to and returning from incidents. The consistently high annual percentage of emergency worker fatalities related to response prompted the Fire Service Emergency Vehicle Safety Initiative (EVSI), a partnership effort among the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)/NHTSA, and the DOT/Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Joint Program Office. One of the primary functions of the EVSI was to sponsor the National Forum on Emergency Vehicle Safety, which brought together representatives of major national-level fire and emergency service associations and other individuals and organizations with an interest and expertise in emergency vehicle safety. These representatives met to: identify the major issues related to firefighter fatalities that occur while responding to or returning from alarms and while operating on highway emergency scenes; develop and prioritize recommendations to reduce firefighter response and highway scene fatalities; identify organizations that had made progress in improving firefighter/responder safety in these areas based on mitigation techniques and technologies; and review and approve the findings of the research done for this report.