Editor’s Note: This article from Mike Thompson was originally published in Instructor Outlook: Volume 12, Number 1, 2015.
A couple of weeks ago, for the third time in the last year and a half or so, I listened to a sinking vehicle call that ended with the death of the caller on the phone. These three calls all had several things in common:
1. All were first-party callers.
2. All callers died/drowned in the background while still on the phone with the calltaker.
3. All cases lasted approximately a minute and a half from pickup until the caller couldn’t speak anymore and the call terminated.
4. Most notably, no vehicle escape instructions were given on any of these calls despite the fact that all of the agencies concerned had our sinking vehicle instructions available to them.
5. Another interesting fact here is that two of these agencies were IAED™ accredited.
Most of the commonalities here shouldn’t really surprise us, as we know statistically that most sinking vehicle reports are first-party callers (remember, not all of them are). We also know historically and statistically that successful escape from a sinking vehicle is relatively rare. The time frames are no surprise either, as we already know these vehicles will most often submerge completely in a minute to two minutes with that metric leaning toward the one minute and change mark. But the last commonality is where the surprise cropped up, for me at least: agencies, even high-performing agencies by most accounts, not using the sinking vehicle instructions they had. It begs the obvious question WHY?
If you listen to these three calls, at least part of the problem becomes very apparent. In each case, the calltaker worked on the address/location with the caller until s/he died in the background. Any viable escape time was completely used up trying to ascertain an accurate location. Interestingly enough, in two of these cases, the calltaker was given an address/location immediately upon asking, but apparently that location didn’t rise to the level of a geo-verified location and the calltakers either didn’t trust it or didn’t hear it clearly and, fatally, kept asking. In the other case, a location just didn’t come.
When something like this happens, a lot of “blame assigning” starts, often with the media and/or elected officials involved with various players in this industry. With these three sinking vehicle cases, the calltaker was directly blamed in one, the state of the wireless locating infrastructure in another, and the caller in the other. In these situations, there is usually enough responsibility (or blame) to go around. Did the calltaker, caller, and/or wireless system all play a part? Very likely, but blame typically does little or nothing to fix the problem. To truly fix it, you have to carefully study the problem, determine a workable solution, and then actually apply it—and that seems to be the hard part.
The wireless issue, suffice it to say, needs work, and we as an industry need to be heavily involved in that. But is it going to happen tomorrow? Not likely. And can we always fix the scared-to-death caller? In my humble opinion, probably not. The person in a car that is rapidly and forcefully filling up with water is going to be justifiably freaked out. There are some things we can do to help his/her emotional state or at least not make it worse, but the best help will be instructing the caller on how to escape and live.
The issue of not giving instructions in a time frame that can help the caller is an aspect I believe we CAN change, and we can do it right now. After listening to these calls, I’ve come to the conclusion that spending any time at all getting an address/location or worse yet, getting one AND then verifying it endlessly, is just using up precious escape time that these people DO NOT HAVE.
The solution we need to be teaching to our students is this: If you get an address or location immediately, great. Put it in and start processing the call with some urgency. If you don’t get a location immediately or if the location doesn’t verify, then override, force entry, or use a nearby intersection or location (most CAD systems will allow that); open ProQA®; get to the instructions; AND GET THEM OUT OF THE VEHICLE.
You don’t have time to do much else. I’ve tested it with ProQA, and once ProQA opens you can be at instructions in about 10 seconds with the knowns you have. In some circumstances at the outset, you may have units that won’t know where to go, but trust me, your dive team or your fire/police department would much rather go looking for these people wet on the bank somewhere as opposed to fishing their dead body out of a submerged car. As another help with determining the location, sinking vehicle situations frequently involve subsequent calls from second- and third-party callers.
Above all, the comm. center personnel that use this protocol need to be very, VERY aware that with sinking vehicle calls in particular, there is a clock ticking in the background that WILL STOP very quickly if something is not done. I fully realize this is counterintuitive to absolutely everything else we do in this industry. All other call types rely on an address/location to ultimately do something about it. However, sinking vehicle is a different animal that needs to be treated differently to get successful results.
The other difficulty presented by sinking vehicle calls is that they don’t happen every day. In fact, you could go your entire career and not get ONE call like this. The solution is to train, train, train again, and then train on it some more. We should be teaching our new students that the location is absolutely secondary on these calls (there’s another call type where it applies also, care to guess what it is?). I have been teaching this with fire and, more recently, medical for a couple of years, and I know a few other instructors are teaching it also, but everybody needs to be emphasizing the need for frequent re-training on the Sinking Vehicle Protocol and the process (everybody is looking for CDE subjects). Low-frequency, high-acuity events like this, especially cases with different processes, require that kind of training concentration. I am going to look for some curriculum additions and maybe some proposed Academy language to help this process.
You may hear arguments against this. Most of these arguments, I suspect, are based on the fact that “We don’t do anything else this way” or that “If we could just spend a little time to get a location AND a police officer close, MAYBE they could effect a rescue,” or “What if they’re out in the boonies somewhere and we never find them?”—I actually heard that one. Negative. You only have to listen to a couple of these calls to realize the only viable option is providing instructions and getting the caller out of the vehicle as quickly as possible. Anything else will likely result in death by drowning.
As always, I welcome your input and suggestions.
Until next time!
Mike Thompson
Fire Protocol, Academics, and Standards Expert
International Academies of Emergency Dispatch®
From Brett:
There are few things ingrained in public safety more deeply than location, location, location. After all, if we can’t get to them, how will we save them!
It may be difficult (and even insulting) for today’s emergency dispatchers to believe that obtaining an accurate location for responders was almost a sole priority in the early days of public safety. In fact, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that emergency dispatchers were even being considered as interventionalists and, even then, the prevailing attitude among public safety operations was that attempting to instruct callers over the phone was more litigious than effective. Fortunately, the evolving expectations of the public and the visions of leaders like Dr. Clawson and others have elevated the role of the emergency dispatcher from simple clerk to lifesaver.
However, old habits are hard to break. Even though Pre-Arrival instructions have become an international standard of care, our order-of-operations priorities have remained somewhat stagnant regarding address verification. This excellent article by Mike Thompson poignantly illustrates why it’s so important we change the above paradigm and seriously consider our dispatch priorities. After all, we are in the business of triage and instruction, and what more clearly illustrates inappropriate triage than arriving on the scene to find a dead patient who likely would have been alive had instructions been given in a timely manner, especially when it was known that even an exceptional response time would not likely have changed the outcome.
Brett A. Patterson
Academics & Standards Associate
Chair, Medical Council of Standards
International Academies of Emergency Dispatch
From Doc:
As cellphones have become ubiquitous, we can expect calls from all sorts of places and situations that were never even possible before. Stuck Accelerator/Can’t Stop Vehicle and Sinking Vehicle calls are two of the most dramatic, and, as I hate to admit generally, for these calls, seconds actually do count here!
The second sinking vehicle call I heard some years ago was a local reporter in her car floating down a flooded pasture. Her call was transferred four times, and while she started the first call joking with the emergency dispatcher, as time went by, she became more frightened and even stated that she could see the lights of a fire station across the way! After a grueling 10 minutes of the call, her phone went dead as she submerged and died. Location was repeatedly asked for over this time frame, while not a single instruction (as we have protolyzed, verified, and refined during the past 24 years since the FPDS was formulated) was given. In one very haunting utterance, she asked the emergency dispatcher if she should get out of her car onto the roof and amazingly was told “No”!
Determination of location should never outrank providing these critical instructions. My answer to “What is their location?” in these instances is always, “We know where they are—they’re approaching the bottom, or heading to the crash site at a high rate of speed …”
That’s my advice, and I’m stickin’ to it …
Doc
