Pardon my silly question but watching some horrible incident on TV, I see rows of police cars, trucks, etc. The action is elsewhere or may even be over. However, the rows of vehicles all are flashing their lights. Is there a reason? I would find it distracting.
Thanks.
Some of that’s left over from the lighting “arms race” of the past couple of decades. Emergency vehicles kept getting hit when parked on the side of an active street/highway, and the thought was to increase visibility by adding more and brighter lights. Coloisions kept happening, lighting increased, repeat. Finally sanity prevailed and there’s been a trend to more moderate lighting and more use of directional cues, but a lot of old-timers and stuck-in-time departments still feel that the safest approach is to turn everything on and leave it on.
When I was doing fire/EMS work I found it very distracting. Our protocol was to shut down strobes and use work lights unless we were the apparatus closest to approaching traffic, and even then you should be careful to avoid blinding the oncoming cars. The problem isn’t that they don’t see you, it’s that they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. Directional arrows work a lot better than hammering the drivers with strobes.
If the street is closed off, as it often is for a fire, there’s no good reason for any vehicles except those blocking traffic to be running strobes. And on straight EMS runs, there’s no point in running strobes when you’re in someone’s driveway. It just attracts attention and makes people nervous. White work lights are a far better option.
Because people are stupid and they’ll crash right into you because they’re distracted or just generally dim. When people see emergency lights flashing, they (should) slow down and get their heads out of their butts.Originally Posted by Glenn E. Meyer
If your lights are on, they’re less likely to hit you. Allegedly. Although that happens too.
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When the action is on-going, the last thing an officer is likely to think about before unassing the car is shutting down the lights. There are a few other reasons as well, but that is one of the most common.
Some research has suggested that there’s a “moth to the flame” effect with drunks that attracts them to bright lights.
For more info:
http://www.iaff.org/hs/evsp/Best%20Practices.pdf
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/...ons/fa_323.pdf
I agree fully! No good deed goes unpunished. If you leave your lights off, sober people on their phone will hit you. If you leave them on, drunks and stoners will hit you.
So lights just help you select for who you want to crash into your parked emergency vehicle with! Both times I got smacked directing traffic, the lights were on. Minor injuries for me on both. I’m nimble for a big guy. With that said, I opt for lights on, since most folks in the area I work in aren’t trying to get stopped or ticketed. So they drive ridiculously slow past us.
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Last edited by 41magfan; 07-03-2018 at 06:45 PM.
The path of least resistance will seldom get you where you need to be.
It’s hard to hear, too, enough as is, without all the additional racket!
Also, department policy dictates emergency equipment usage. If I got hit, or hit someone else, and did/didn’t have my emergency equipment activated, it could cause problems for me.
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Last edited by Sherman A. House DDS; 07-03-2018 at 06:56 PM.
I'm happy when the sirens get turned off upon arriving on scene
This right here as well as State RCW may come into play.
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