Kevin Elliott  0:05  
Welcome to home safely, a podcast from the National Center for rural road safety. Hi everyone. I'm Kevin Elliot. I'm your host on the podcast, and I'm the marketing manager for the National Center for Rural Road Safety. Each episode on our podcast will bring you stories, strategies, and solutions that are helping communities across the country make their roads safer for everyone. Whether you're behind the wheel, designing the road, or just a community member, we're all working together out there to get everyone home safely. Enjoy the episode!

Kevin Elliott  0:38  
Hi everybody. I'm here with Jack Sullivan. He is the director of training for the Emergency Responders Safety Institute. It's a very important organization, and I've heard Jack speak before, and he's he's a passionate advocate for responder safety and for our audience who may not be as familiar with this world or this, this sort of segment of rural roadway safety, we thought it's super important to have somebody like Jack on to tell everybody what it's like out there in rural areas for people who come after the crash happens. Ideally, we want to prevent the crash, but we need people like Jack and his folks. Those crashes happen. We need them to show up. That is a challenge sometimes in rural areas, and so we wanted to have Jack on. He's super articulate about these, these types of things, and he spent a career in them. So Jack Sullivan, welcome to the show, and thanks for coming.

Jack Sullivan  1:28  
Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate the ability to spend some time with you talk about this subject.

Kevin Elliott  1:33  
Let's start at the top, if you'll tell everybody, what is the Emergency Responder Safety Institute.

Jack Sullivan  1:38  
The Emergency Responders Safety Institute is a group of emergency response professionals scattered all over the country, representing the fire service, emergency medical services, law enforcement, Department of Transportation, Safety Service, patrols and the towing and recovery industry. All of those people are the ones that typically respond to roadway crashes in any kind of environment. So it varies from place to place around the country, who you might see at any one particular crash scene or an incident on the highway, but those primarily are the folks that we're working with. It's made up of volunteers. We don't have a paid staff as such. Never have had one. We've been in business since 1998 and we started in 1998 because of two rather important incidents that occurred within a few months of each other. In March of 1998 the fire department that I had just retired from had an incident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for a relatively minor crash that resulted in 10 of our personnel being struck by an out of control tractor trailer. It killed one firefighter, Dave Good, who did not survive the incident, and put the other nine responders in the hospital. And in March of 1998 in the emergency services world, there were not a lot of us talking about roadway incident safety or highway incident safety. It just wasn't on our radar screen from the earliest days when I joined the fire department in 1972 if you put your helmet and turnout gear on and walked out in front of traffic and put your hand up, traffic stopped and they waited for you to give them direction. Unfortunately, the kind of environment that we live in today that doesn't necessarily always happen that way. Several months later, there was a second crash that occurred on Interstate 81 in the state of Maryland, near Hagerstown, and one of the personnel that was struck at that incident also died at the scene. And as a result, because he was a very prominent member of the Cumberland Valley volunteer Firemen's Association, which we now refer to as the Firefighters Association, they began to look into the same issue that I was studying on the issue of highway incident safety, or roadway incident safety. At the time, we formed the emergency responder Safety Institute, opened a big tent and gathered as many people as we could who we considered to be experts in the business from all walks of life. And we've been working on this subject ever since, developing strategies and tactics and training for those responders that respond to various types of roadway incidents on a daily basis, not just crashes, but vehicle fires, medical emergencies, hazmat incidents, disabled vehicles on the side of the road that tow truck drivers respond to law enforcement and traffic stops and the things that they get involved with on a daily basis. All of these put our personnel in harm's way, exposed to moving traffic, and unfortunately, the drivers that we deal with today are so distracted that they are not always looking out the windshield and watching out for our personnel who are working on the side of the road.

Kevin Elliott  4:43  
I'm on your website right now, and there's a little section called line of duty deaths, and it's a there's the headline, "wrecker service speaks out after worker killed by semi truck". "Highway Safety patroller struck killed on i 95 Highway" "Patrol Trooper struck and killed during a traffic stop". Yeah, I wouldn't think the average driver thinks of this, right? When, when we have a crash, say, we're thinking of the victims of that crash. We're thinking of the people involved. Now, we've all seen the red and blue lights, right? We've all seen the Fire Truck Show. We've all seen but I'm not, I'm not sure we then think, oh, oh my goodness, those people just put their life on the line. They have risks that we might not anticipate. So what are some of those risks that they are facing, in addition to just doing a very hard job,

Jack Sullivan  5:30  
Line of duty, deaths is an area that we are the only ones right now tracking in the country, no other government agency is tracking line of duty deaths from being struck by vehicles at incident scenes where we need help. And part of the issue here is there is no accurate number of how many emergency responders are being struck and injured by vehicles at an incident scene or having close calls, or the emergency vehicles that are being struck at an incident scene, when they're parked with their flashing lights on, we get reports on almost a daily basis of emergency vehicles or the responders themselves being struck by vehicles. Sometimes it just results in property damage to the vehicle itself. Sometimes it results in property damage and an injury. Might be a minor injury, or could be a very significant injury that sometimes results in life changing situations for those responders that are struck. We have a responder here in the Richmond, Virginia area that I work with on a regular basis who was struck by a vehicle while assisting police at an incident a few years ago, ended up losing both legs in that incident, and that's a life changing situation at that point. Unfortunately, those numbers sometimes get lost, and we don't hear about them as much. The line of duty deaths, the word travels around pretty quickly in that area, except for in the towing community. Sometimes the towers don't get the same kind of notice in the news media as a police officer, firefighter or EMT paramedic might get if they are struck and killed at an incident scene. So what we're trying to do is to do a better job of collecting data on these incidents, to make it a little bit more prominent in the eyes of those people that can help us make a change. But everybody who works at any of these incidents in any kind of environment, whether it's a rural road or a highway of some sort, if you're exposed to moving traffic with the distractions that are in the cockpit today of every vehicle that's on the road, there is a chance that somebody is going to be struck, or something in the way of our emergency equipment is going to be struck at one of those incident scenes.

Kevin Elliott  7:45  
For most of our audience that are on the engineering and planning side, building roads, maintaining roads, managing traffic, we know that things are different in rural areas, right? They just have particular challenges that say the urban or the interstate system don't have and they have their own. Is that true also in in your field? And if so, how is it different? What are some of the peculiar challenges in the rural systems?

Jack Sullivan  8:12  
Yeah, we've done a good job over the last 20 something years at this point, of teaching emergency responders to use their emergency vehicles to block at an incident scene as kind of the last line of defense against what we refer to as D drivers. There are distracted drivers, there's drunk drivers, there's drugged drivers, there's drowsy drivers. We refer to them as D drivers, and there's a long list of D's that are involved there. But the last line of defense at an incident scene is typically an emergency vehicle parked in a blocking fashion. And more and more often, that blocking vehicle is a fire apparatus of some sort, a fire pumper truck, a ladder truck, a rescue truck of some sort, because typically that is the largest vehicle that's responding to one of these incidents. In many cases, when we talk about blocking at a highway incident where it's a multi lane highway, we can take a lane of traffic out of the equation and still let traffic pass by, we hope at a reduced speed on the other two lanes that are open. But when we get into a rural road situation. Most of the rural roads are only two lanes, one in each direction, and if you block a lane of traffic to protect the responders and the victims of the original incident, now you've created another problem in that there's only one lane with two opposing types of traffic. You either have to prevent the traffic from passing altogether, or you have to use your resources, whatever might be available, to manually control traffic going past the incident scene, if the situation is such that they can pass and the roads not completely blocked by the incident itself. So the lane blocking is one of the biggest differences we see. On rural roads, if we have to reroute traffic on it, you know, on a state highway or a federal highway of some sort, if you reroute traffic at a an exit, it's easy to get them back on that route somewhere nearby, on a rural road, in many places in the country, there may not be a reasonable way to reroute traffic or detour traffic around an incident scene without going 10s, 20s, 30 miles, 40 miles or even longer, in some cases, out of the way, and that takes resources that sometimes we don't have if you're trying to reroute or detour traffic in rural areas, a lot of the responders, whether firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, very often respond direct to an incident seen in their personal vehicle. And that creates challenges too, because we're traveling much further distances. It takes longer to get to the incident in some cases, or it takes longer to gather all of the people and resources and equipment that we need at an incident in a rural zone, the geography that we deal with is different. Federal Highways, for the most part, are pretty level. There might be some hills and whatnot on some roads, but for the most part, you can see far in advance of where you're going on a rural road. We have a lot of hills, we have a lot of curves, we have a lot of areas where you can't see very far in front of you, and that means that we have people traveling at fairly high rates of speed, coming around to bend real quick, and all of a sudden, seeing flashing lights in front of them that can result in secondary crashes, as we refer to them. And then in rural areas, we've got much less equipment available to us. We've got to remember that the rural volunteer fire departments and EMS agencies around the country have fiscal challenges today, just like state D O T's have, and they're depending on volunteer manpower to get their job done, but they also need fiscal resources for equipment and maintenance and upkeep, and that's a challenge in a lot of places. We still have volunteer fire departments around the country who have to run chicken dinners and bingo halls and things like that to raise funds to just keep fuel in the vehicle so they can respond to incidents. Those are just some of the unique challenges that we find in the rural areas.

Kevin Elliott  12:18  
That's a great, very comprehensive explanation of that. For those who don't know the term, explain what a secondary crash is and what that means if you're in an incident.

Jack Sullivan  12:27  
The secondary crashes are what we're trying to prevent when we get to an incident scene. So let's imagine for a moment that there's been a motor vehicle crash on a road in a rural area. Somebody calls 911, and a dispatcher then dispatches, maybe fire and EMS resources, and probably a local sheriff or police department for that area. In some cases, it'll be a state trooper, maybe coming from an even further distance, because there aren't as many troopers out there today as we used to have. These people all get to an incident scene, and they start to congregate, whether it's with an emergency vehicle, like a fire pumper truck, an ambulance, a police car, and if you're dealing with a volunteer operation, in some cases, you have volunteers arriving at the scene from an EMS or fire perspective, in their own personal vehicles. It's going to take a while to gather the resources that are necessary for the incident. If it's a minor incident, things will get cleared up pretty quickly, and people will move on. If it's a major incident, where there's serious injuries and maybe extrication needed, it might take longer these folks get on the scene at that point, and they're going to do the best they can with the resources that they have at the time. One of the things that we're concerned about is the possibility of another crash happening in the area of that initial crash that maybe involves an emergency vehicle, an emergency responder or other vehicles in the area, and we refer to them as secondary crashes. Those secondary crashes is what we're trying to prevent when they involve our responders that results in injury, line of duty, death, damage to an emergency vehicle, maybe all three, in some cases, sometimes multiple people, multiple responders, are struck in a secondary crash. Probably the simplest secondary crash that we see frequently is a rear end crash from people being distracted by the activity at the incident scene and paying attention to what's going on at the incident, not paying attention to the traffic in front of them, and they might, at lower speeds, bump into the car in front of them because they weren't paying attention to the fact that traffic was slowing down and, in many cases, coming to a stop because of the incident itself.

Kevin Elliott  14:40  
Excellent. Well, I tell you what, I have a couple follow on questions to that, but we're going to take a little break here first. I'm here with Jack Sullivan. He is the director of training for the Emergency Responders Safety Institute, and we will be right back after this break.

Kevin Elliott  14:58  
You might be listening to this podcast, but, maybe you aren't familiar with the National Center for Rural Road Safety. We're a Federal Highway Administration National Center for Excellence, dedicated exclusively to saving lives on rural roads. We offer free training and technical assistance, monthly webinars and other content, all customized to life in rural communities. We are a national hub that equips local agencies, first responders and communities with the tools they need to make rural travel safer, because we can't achieve zero deaths on America's roadways without addressing rural roadways together, we can make sure everyone gets home safely. Learn more at rural safety center.org 

Kevin Elliott  15:41  
All right, we're back with Jack Sullivan. He's the director of training with the emergency responders Safety Institute. We're having a great conversation about what that means, and especially in rural areas and some of the challenges that emergency responders and tow truck drivers and everybody else who has to respond to a severe crash in a rural area, what their life is like and some of the challenges they have and some of the dangers they face, and then hopefully raise awareness and help to make them safer. So Jack, we were talking before the break about secondary crashes and just what can happen in these rural areas. You can get a real mess really fast if a driver is either going too fast or not paying attention or or all the above. So let's talk about that. If you're in a rural area, these communities know each other, and they can talk to each other. It's never good for somebody to be in danger. But in rural areas, these first responders are their neighbors and friends, and a lot of these are just volunteer people. What are some tips that if drivers are out there on a rural road, it's late at night, it's dark, it's two lane road, not a lot of shoulder, all the all the rural conditions that they if they see those lights on the horizon, right, they see those blue lights. What? What are? What should they do?

Jack Sullivan  16:53  
The first thing I'd ask them to do is slow down. If it looks like there's something going on up ahead, slow down. Take into consideration that there's going to be changes in the roadway. Cars are going to be parked there, trucks are going to be parked there. There's going to be a lot of activity. If you come into that situation at 70 or 75 miles an hour, which some people do on rural roads, you won't have the time to react appropriately if somebody moves a piece of equipment or steps out in front of you. First and foremost, we ask that you slow down and as you approach the incident scene, look for what we call temporary traffic control devices. Might be cones. Could be flares, a stop and slow paddle held by a responder who's trying to get that traffic to alternate back and forth on the one open lane that might be there, but we want you to be able to slow down and react appropriately to whatever temporary traffic control devices might be in place. In some cases, you might have to come to a complete stop. It may be that the road is blocked by the incident itself. That happens frequently. You may not be able to proceed forward. A lot of people are impatient. They will try to turn around and go back a different way. If they think they know the area that can cause problems too, and there might be other emergency vehicles approaching the scene from behind you. We want to make sure that you're not causing a problem for other emergency vehicles that might be approaching the scene. So the biggest thing is to slow down on highways. We tell people to move over. Also, that's not possible on rural roads for the most part. So slow down, watch for the temporary traffic controls that might be in place and react appropriately to them. Take a deep breath and just be patient. Those folks that are working the scene, are going to try to get you through there as quickly as possible, but they're also looking at the safety of the victims that they're responding to help in the first place, and their personnel and yours as a driver that's on that road, pay attention to the directions they're given giving you, and follow their directions.

Kevin Elliott  18:58  
Yeah, chances are the victims of that crash are having a worse day than you are being inconvenienced by being at an incident. So it's just a little we're all trying to get where we're going and understand that, but that compassion to go, Hey, these people need me to defer right now. You mentioned, too before the break that a lot of backups happen, sort of what we call rubber necking, right? People want to see what's going on. They slow down to see what's going on. And I'm sure we've all experienced this where traffic has backed up a long way, and then you realize, oh, they the whole crash has been moved to the side of the road, and it's this slowdown. Is just people slowing down to look and see what's going on. That's not the priority, right? Then, right? If for you, the driver, to know what's going on. The priority is clear the scene so these people can work.

Jack Sullivan  19:45  
Yeah, and I think we always tell people pay attention to where you're driving, not the incident scene itself. And I know that's difficult. We deal those of us in emergency services deal with vehicles and flashing lights on a regular basis. It's not a big deal to us. It's part of our everyday life. For a lot of people, they don't see it every day, and it is fascinating. It's interesting, and they are drawn to it in a variety of different ways. We have people who will make a point of slowing down and or stopping to take a picture or to shoot video of the incident as they pass by. Everybody knows that social media is a big thing these days, and everybody wants to be recognized on social media. So if they get that first picture of the incident, or they shoot some video of all the emergency vehicles as they pass by, that's a big deal to a lot of folks. But when they're doing that, they're not paying attention to their own driving and the vehicles around them, they're still moving in one direction or the other or maybe multiple directions, and that can very often lead to a secondary crash. We want people, as they come up on the incident scene, slow down, follow the temporary traffic control messaging that's in place at the time, whether it's by people or equipment, pass by the incident scene by watching where you're driving and not paying attention to the incident. I know it's difficult, but pay attention to where you're driving and avoid that secondary crash.

Kevin Elliott  21:08  
So you're the Director of Training at Responder Safety Institute. And what kind of training do you all do?

Jack Sullivan  21:16  
We do a lot of things. The first thing we do, I guess, is try to make sure that all of those responders that are taking care of roadway incidents, whether they're fires, crashes, medical emergencies, hazmat scenes, disabled vehicles, law enforcement activities or whatever that they get trained on the basics of what we call Traffic Incident Management. The basic Traffic Incident Management Training gets these people to understand and be aware of the hazards of working around moving traffic. You have to understand or remember, in some cases, these volunteers that are responding to these incidents are relatively new at being in a volunteer and emergency organization. They're a new volunteer firefighter, or they're a new volunteer EMT, maybe they've been through training for the last six months, eight months, 10 months, whatever the case may be, but at some point they start responding to incidents. And it may be the first few times that they respond to an incident, they're just as fascinated by what's going on around them as the drivers that are trying to get by the incident scene. We've got to remember that these folks are doing the best they can with the level of training that they have. We try to make them aware of the hazards from day one so they understand that as soon as they step out of their emergency vehicle, they're stepping in to harm's way. There are a lot of firefighters that I talk to these days that tell me they would rather fight fire in a building, then work a crash at a highway or roadway incident of some sort, because we know what the building is going to do in most cases and how it's going to react to a fire. We don't know how these drivers are going to react to an incident scene, whether they're paying attention, if they're drunk, if they're drugged, if they're drowsy, if they're falling asleep as they pass by the incident scene. Like I said earlier, we see these secondary crashes occur on almost a daily basis someplace in the country multiple times a day, sometimes. So we try to make them aware of the hazards, and then we try to give them some guidance on how to operate at an incident in the safest manner possible. I don't know as there's any definitive way that we can absolutely positively protect everybody at an incident scene, but there certainly are a number of things that we can do to protect the responders and the victims they're responding to help in the first place, and the other drivers that are operating on the road or highway around that particular incident scene. So the training piece, after we get them aware of the hazards, is to teach them how to manage traffic and how to make the scene as safe as possible, regardless of the type of environment that you're working in, whether it's a rural road or a high speed, limited access highway.

Kevin Elliott  23:58  
One of the biggest jobs of these organizations is to raise awareness of these problems. And one of the ways we do that, at the National Center for Rural Road Safety is Rural Road Safety Awareness Week every July. Well, there is another big safety week going on this week. It's Crash Responder Safety Week, which is directly relevant to this and the work that Jack does. It's put on by the the FHWA National Operations Center of Excellence. And the Jack and his team, they participate in this, and they they share these things. So Jack, just tell us a little bit about this week and why it's so important for people to to know about this.

Jack Sullivan  24:35  
We support it and have from day one, because what they're trying to do is to make the general public aware of what goes on at a crash scene, that those responders that are working the crash scene are exposed to secondary incidents that could result in property damage to their emergency vehicle, an injury, sometimes a life changing injury, or, unfortunately, in many cases, a line of duty death. We're already up. To 25 fatalities this year for responders that were struck while they were working at incident scenes. That number is a little bit lower than previous years. I hate to say it. We're not at the end of the year yet, and unfortunately, the statistics tell us that we'll probably be much closer to 40 or 45 responders struck and killed by the end of the year. We've been trying to drive that number down for years, and we make progress every once in a while, the idea of crash responder Safety Week is to highlight the issue make the general public aware of what's going on out there and how our emergency responders are training for, preparing for and responding to incidents to try and make them as safe as possible. So it's up to the Federal Highway Administration to bring us all together from a variety of different backgrounds and disciplines during that week to promote that message nationwide.

Kevin Elliott  25:56  
Okay, we're gonna take one more break. I'm here with Jack Sullivan. He's the director of training for the Emergency Responders Safety Institute. We're having a great conversation. Great conversation about maybe a lesser known aspect of rural road safety, and those are the folks who show up once the crash has happened. We want to prevent those but when they are not, we need these very important people to come. So I'm going to come back in just a minute, and we're going to we're going to talk about how crash responder safety and first responders fit into the safe system approach. We'll be right back. 

Kevin Elliott  26:29  
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Kevin Elliott  27:12  
Okay, we're back with Jack Sullivan. He's the director of training for the emergency responders Safety Institute. We're having a great conversation about crash responder safety and the folks that come out after these terrible crashes happen, especially in rural areas, and the challenges they face when they're when they're trying to save lives out there, one of the approaches, the main approach, that Federal Highway Administration and other agencies are taking to get ahead of this, this this road traffic safety crisis, actually in the country, is called the safe system approach. And if you haven't heard of that, it's a it's an approach that's been tried in other places around the world and seen really good results, but it's a much more holistic way to look at transportation safety and non traditional partners working together. And one of those partners, and one of those elements of the safe system approach is post crash care, and that's where Jack and his folks come in. So Jack talk a little bit about how your piece, your field, those very important people, fit into the larger safe system approach.

Jack Sullivan  28:20  
The SAFE system approach really starts with the design and building of the roads and highways. So your engineers and developers that are putting the roads together and whatnot, that starts things after the roads are open and traffic is running. There's all kinds of other pieces to the safe system approach that involves maintaining traffic at safe levels, and controlling the traffic in a variety of different environments. Obviously, if we get to the part where we have to respond to a crash, all of those things in the safe system approach failed in some way to result in a crash. We know that the vast majority, the highest percentage of these crashes are because of driver activities. It's not the road, it's not the environment, it's not the traffic, it's the drivers that are causing these crashes. And we encourage people to use the term crash instead of accident, because in most cases, it's not an accident. It's a crash that could have been prevented if the driver was doing their job in an appropriate manner. So the safe system approach. When we get to a crash response, that means that everything else has failed. We've had an incident, and now our personnel want to get in there, take care of the victims as quickly and as safely as possible, clear the road as quickly and safely as possible and resume the normal level of traffic through that area as quickly and safely as possible. And that means a coordinated response from all the different agencies and disciplines that respond to these incidents. They work together. They understand who's in charge of what kind of work in a single. Organized fashion that allows them to handle the incident as quickly and efficiently and safely as possible. And that's the last piece of that safe system approach.

Kevin Elliott  30:09  
Basically one big effort you are you all are working on at the Emergency Responder Safety Institute, is data collection, because this is a very common problem in rural areas where you want to make the best decisions with your investments and make approaches, but you need to know, you have to have a good picture of what's actually going on, which requires data. And in your field, there's a giant data hole, right? We just don't know. And so you all are working with Federal Highway Administration to and have a way for people to report to you, to collect data when they see a crash out there. Talk a little bit about that effort,

Jack Sullivan  30:49  
Yeah, one of the problems we have is that nobody really knows how many of these secondary crashes involving emergency responders actually occur. The ones that result in fatalities. Very often get news media coverage, and frankly, that's where we get a lot of our information, as we record the fatalities nationwide from secondary crashes. But there are a whole lot more incidents that we know that occur on a daily basis that just involve damage to emergency vehicles or injuries, sometimes minor, sometimes major, injuries to the responders, but not fatalities. And very often, those incidents don't get a lot of news media attention, therefore don't get to us or federal highway. Nobody really knows how many of them are happening. The more information that we can collect on the number of secondary crashes that are occurring and the circumstances involving those secondary crashes is extremely important. It will tell us a story and give us some clues as to other things we might be able to do at incident scenes to prevent a secondary crash and protect our responders and the victims of the initial crash. Anybody can report a secondary crash using the website report struck by.com it's part of the responder safety calm website. It takes less than four minutes to report an incident. It has basic drop down menus to report the incident, where it happened, when it happened, what kind of roadway, what kind of environment was it at the time? Was it a vehicle fire? Was it a vehicle crash? Was it some other incident type? Was it just a disabled vehicle that a tow truck driver was working on? Was law enforcement involved with a traffic stop of some sort that resulted in the secondary crash? Any information that you can provide can be filled into this form, and if you don't know the answer to one of the questions, just skip it and go to the next one. It'll take you less than four minutes to report this secondary crash. All of that information is then being screened. We'll look for additional information, sometimes from the responding agencies that were involved in the incident, depending on the type and level of seriousness, and hopefully over time, we will get better insight as to not only what's causing these secondary crashes, but more importantly, what we can do to prevent those secondary crashes that maybe we're not already doing now. So reportstruckby.com, all one word, is where you can report these secondary crashes, and we need everyone's help on this.

Kevin Elliott  33:22  
Excellent reportstruckby.com So Jack, you're the director of training. You all do a lot. We know that training and education. We do a lot of that at the National Center for Rural Road Safety as well, because we know continuing education and it is a big key to to solving a lot of these problems. So do you have any trainings that are super relevant right now, or that would be really good for us to talk about, that people can engage with you all on?

Jack Sullivan  33:51  
Yeah we would hope that the responders in rural areas would make an effort to at least complete the very basic four hour traffic incident management training that's provided nationwide at no cost. There's a variety of different ways that responders can acquire that training can be done in an instructor led classroom type environment. You can reach out to your local fire departments, State Department of Transportation, state police, Department of Motor Vehicles, depending on the state that you're in, one of those agencies has the responsibility to arrange for and provide that traffic incident management training from a national level perspective, it's a four hour class, if you can't get it in an instructor led class, which is what we would prefer that you do, and we encourage the instructors that are teaching those classes to do it in a mixed discipline environment. Do it so that you've got police officers, firefighters, EMTs, tow truck drivers, D, o, t personnel and Safety Service patrols all sitting in the classroom at the. Same time hearing the same message and communicating and collaborating with each other on how to respond to these incidents and how to deal with them, and more importantly, how to protect their personnel at those incident seats. Once they've done that, if they can't do it in a classroom type environment, it's available online from a variety of different sources. Some states have their own online traffic incident management training. Responder safety offers Traffic Incident Management training through our website and the Online Learning Network. Federal Highway has the basic four hour Tim training also available online. There's a variety of different ways that it can be acquired, but we want everybody to take that training first. Then we encourage even the folks that are in the rural areas to look at establishing what we call traffic incident management committees, or groups, where representatives from your disciplines in your area, your region, get together on a periodic basis to talk about the ways you're going to respond to these incidents. Talk about standard operating procedures. Who's responsible for what, how to collaborate and cooperate with each other at these incident scenes to handle them as quickly as possible. We want folks to use the Incident Command System, which is typical in EMS and fire law enforcement. We want to make sure they're wearing a high visibility PPE. We want to make sure their emergency vehicles have the proper high visibility graphics and emergency warning lights, and that they manage and use those appropriately at incident scenes. In some cases, and especially in rural road environments, we very often end up with emergency personnel manually directing traffic around an incident. We want to make sure that the people who are responsible for manually directing traffic get the training that they need to do that that's very common in the law enforcement community. But who's going to do that manual traffic control if law enforcement hasn't arrived at the scene yet, typically it's going to be a volunteer firefighter or maybe DMT of some sort. We want to make sure that we use the emergency lighting appropriately at an incident scene, and can that these folks conduct after action reviews after an incident to talk about what worked well, what didn't work so well, what they can do better in the future. And we also encourage folks to implement public outreach strategies in your local area. How do you teach the general public about your activities out on the roads at these incident scenes, and what you want them to do in your area, to respond appropriately and drive through past those incident scenes in a safe manner. So there's a ton of things that can be done that go beyond the four hour Tim training, as we refer to it. From a national perspective, we've got 48 different modules online, available for free at responders safety.com that cover a lot of these additional subjects that go beyond that four hour basic Tim training. And we encourage folks in rural areas to take advantage of that, look and see, get their people involved with some of the topics that go beyond the basics.

Kevin Elliott  38:01  
Thank you for that. And at the National Center, one of the tracks of our road safety champion program as a first responder track as well that people can jump into, there's so much great training out there and so many opportunities for people to learn how to keep these people safe. Jack, I really appreciate you coming and advocating for this, this group of people and highlighting this very crucial need for for safety, for these, for crash responders. So I've been with Jack Sullivan, the director of training from the Emergency Responder Safety Institute, and Jack, I really appreciate you taking so much time and bringing this to our audience.

Jack Sullivan  38:38  
Thanks for the invitation. We are always looking for ways to get our message out to more people, so we appreciate the time with you.

Kevin Elliott  38:49  
Thanks for riding along with us on home safely. If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who care about making rural roads safer for more resources training or upcoming events, visit us at rural safety center.org and until next time, stay safe. Stay connected, and let's all get home safely. You.