Every day I see ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks hauling ass down the road, honking and shrieking with sirens, while masses of (mostly shitty) drivers frantically scramble to get out of the way. The guys who drive these vehicles must do this 10 times a day or more, every single day.
Yet I have NEVER seen an emergency vehicle crash or even bump into another vehicle, or a light pole, a parked car, etc.
Do these drivers have to go through advanced driving courses? Even if so, I’d think they’d occasionally crash - if not by their own fault, then by another driver’s.
Police cars crash at twice the per-mile rate of civilian cars.
I’m surprised at the percentage of crashes in “emergency mode” for ambulances and fire trucks; I thought it’d be much closer to 100%, since they generally aren’t patrolling the roads in non-emergency mode like police cars do.
But they still have just as many miles in non-emergency mode as in emergency, because whenever they respond to an emergency, they have to go back to wherever they’re based.
I would expect ambulances to perform some portion of their return trips in emergency mode, as they are occasionally hauling critical-condition patients to the hospital. The site I linked to claims that 60% of ambulance crashes happen while operating in emergency mode. If we assume that they spend 60% of their road miles operating in emergency mode (e.g. exceeding speed limits and passing through intersections against traffic signals), then it sure looks like emergency mode isn’t all that dangerous, at least for ambulances.
For fire trucks, assume half of their miles (i.e. the outbound leg of every round trip) are conducted in emergency mode. The stat says 70% of their crashes happen in emergency mode, so I guess you’re right, it does seem a little more dangerous for them.
Exactly so. I’d guess that most “service trips” for an ambulance are either:
a) Home base -> patient location -> medical facility (transporting patient) -> home base
b) Home base -> patient location -> home base
I might even guess that, for an actual ambulance (one that is built for transporting a patient, as opposed to an EMT / paramedic vehicle), the first type of trip is more common than the second.
With water tanker fire trucks there is a problem that they have a high center of gravity; volunteer firefighters lack adequate training and consequently drive them like they drive cars–and the trucks tip over going around curves because they are going too fast.
Here’s a cite on the relationship between police officer crashes and officer fatalities:
Not only do they get in crashes, but they also get injured at higher rates because they are not buckled up. I would postulate that this might apply to some of the ambulance team as well, who are working in the back with a patient.
Many ambulances don’t operate out of a single ‘home base’ - in order to reduce response times, ambulances will be stationed at predetermined locations (often near major roads/freeway access) in their area of responsibility.
For example, a fire or car accident pulls ambulances off their assigned locations to bring patients to hospitals. In order to maintain a low response time, dispatchers may tell ambulances from other parts of the region to move to pre-determined locations near where the fire was, so that a call from the nursing home in an area near the fire will still have a shorter response time.
A typical ambulance day (on a very quiet day) might look like:
Home Base -> Temporary Base 1 -> Pt Location -> Medical Facility -> Temporary Base 2 -> Pt Location -> Temporary Base 3 -> Pt Location -> Medical Facility -> Temporary Base 2 -> Home Base
However, not all ambulance services do this, depending on their geography and funding.
Ninja’d on the volunteer firefighters. They scare me to death. Mr.Wrekker had to pull a firetruck out of a ditch one time, they took the curve too fast and plowed right into a high embankment. There was a ambulance wreck in my state not too long ago, the riders and EMTs were okay, but the other car had a fatality.
Very often. My wife was in four accidents during her 10 years with FDNY EMS. Three were caused by asshole civilian drivers ignoring lights and sirens, one was her backing into a car (visibility is a problem in their trucks). Driving an ambulance is a risky job. A friend of ours was killed last year loading a patient in the back when a nutjob hopped into the cab, backed over her, and dragged her two city blocks.
Jennshark that is terrible. When I last lived in LA, in more crowded area of the city, they would send out police officers with the ambulance. The ambulance would inch along through traffic, lights on, sirens ringing, no one moving out of the way. There would be an announcement blared out that said something like, “when you see lights and hear a siren, you must move out of the way.” The police would start handing out tickets. Sometimes it helped, and sometimes it didn’t. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. People can be real assholes.
Yeah I have a friend on FB who’s an EMT and he posts some harrowing shit sometimes. I’m pretty sure that as mass shootings and terrorism continue to be a problem, “tactical medics” will become more and more of a thing with police departments/ambulance services. There are a lot of trained military medics who could step into that role in civilian life if they have the desire to keep at it.
Actually, ambulances will have a lot of trips with no emergency portion at all. Whenever there’s a big event with a lot of people, there will be an ambulance (or multiple) dispatched to the site and parked there, just in case something happens and it’s needed… but it usually isn’t. And the event needn’t even be all that big: Around here, there’s usually an ambulance at high school football games, for instance.
Stand-bys, food runs, occasional other errands (we can respond from wherever we are if we’re in the ambulance) are all non-emergency driving.
We do a vehicle check at the beginning of every shift; we must fill it up at ½ tank & frequently do at ¾ of a tank because the vehicle is always left running on scene due to the electrical load & a fire standby can be a couple of hours of running whereas we could sometimes turn it off for a scheduled standby (race, airshow, HS football, etc. especially if we were able to plug in.)
Some jurisdictions will respond to certain calls at non-emergency speed, though we don’t. A significant portion of transports to the hospital are non-emergency speed (if the patient is stable.)
Therefore running “hot” is only a small fraction of total driving.
In this state you’re required to take the appropriate version (EMS, Fire, PD) of EVOC - Emergency Vehicle Operator’s Course before being allowed to drive on the roads. On a closed road/parking lot doing things like emergency braking & swerves - lotta fun!
ETA: Around here, a lot of the intersections have Opticoms turning the traffic light red for all but the direction of the emergency vehicle. I’ve gone 10-15 mins to the hospital & never had to slow for a light once.
I would say it also has to do with the city. In San Jose emergency vehicles come to a full stop at intersections when they do not have a green light. In Frisco they depend on their lights and sirens. I watch a fire truck coming at me down a narrow street through several intersections never stopping once and it appeared that they were not even slowing down. This was a street with blind corners, stop signs, and signal lights that were red.
Older (immediately post WW2 era) fire engines in the UK did not have interior baffles which meant that the water inside could slosh around and they had to go around corners very slowly.