High risks associated with driving heavy emergency vehicles
Thank you for choosing Automatic Translation. Currently we are offering translations from English into French and German, with more translation languages to be added in the near future. Please be aware that these translations are generated by a third party AI software service. While we have found that the translations are mostly correct, they may not be perfect in every case. To ensure the information you read is correct, please refer to the original article in English. If you find an error in a translation which you would like to bring to our attention, it would help us greatly if you let us know. We can correct any text or section, once we are aware of it. Please do not hesitate to contact our webmaster to let us know of any translation errors.
Emergency Driving with fire vehicles can be very dangerous, especially during winter conditions. Drivers who don´t have the training for driving heavy vehicles sometimes, and perhaps don´t do too many calls in a year, run the risk of being caught by lethal surprise of how the vehicle behaves at higher speeds.
By: Bjorn Ulfsson, CTIF NEWS
The required training to drive a fire vehicle is often much less than for driving a commercial truck - and too many fire teams have paid the ultimate price for this lack of training - training which should be the responsibility of the employer, not the volunteer (or professional) firefighter to provide.
Especially the water tank can cause problems for the untrained driver - there is a lot of weight in the tank of a fire truck and particularly if the tank is not full, the water can sway from side to side inside the tank, causing a violent wobbling effect on the road during turns.
This video is an 11 minute long documentary from a fatal accident with a fire truck in Sweden July 2012, where two volunteer firefighters were killed and three others were injured, following a slight, partial road collapse where the driver lost control of the vehicle when one of the wheels went off the tarmac.
In this case, the driver was very experienced, and perhaps this particular accident, no further training could have prevented this loss - but the fact is, many drivers do not know how much speed their vehicle can handle, because they don´t have formal training for heavy vehicles.
The video is produced by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) and is filmed by Leif Seger & Björn Ulfsson. (2013) This film is part of the 90 Seconds documentary series with educational videos for firefighters.
By Björn Ulfsson, CTIF Communications Group
