Sudden impact

Last Wednesday evening, a bit before 8:00 PM, a finial on the roof of a 10-story downtown building fell without warning to the sidewalk. I'm guessing that the concrete finial is about two feet tall, and around 40 pounds.  The impact left a bit of a crater in the pavement below. Good thing there wan't a pedestrian in the drop zone.  I think that would have left a mark.

Communication is the key

Last December, stranded in the Seattle Airport waiting for a delayed flight, I was absorbed by the local news coverage of a shooting at the Clackamas Mall in Portland. One of the things I noticed in the video from the news helicopters was what appeared to be excellent staging and triage set up by the fire & rescue and police personnel. I wondered if we would be as organized here in Lincoln if something like this happened.

Back in Lincoln, I blogged about an impression from the TV in the airport bar that caught my attention. I made this post at about 5:30 AM on Friday, December 14, 2012. Later that morning, the police chief, fire chief, 911 center manager and I gathered for our weekly joint meeting. One of the discussion items was my desire for our public safety agencies to plan and execute a training exercise this spring focused on an active shooter event. I wanted to both assess and improve our ability to get life-saving care to patients in an emergent incident when seconds count, and when the situation is still somewhat unsettled.

Little did we know as we met that Friday to lay the groundwork for this exercise, that at the same time a mass murder was underway at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. It was a bizarre coincidence. As we left our meeting, I heard the first early reports on the AM radio in my car.

The joint training exercise we first discussed last December was held yesterday at Kloefkorn Elementary School here in Lincoln.  It was a full-scale event, with about 50 first responders participating from LPD, LF&R and the 911 Center, along with several volunteers and Lincoln Public Schools personnel, especially the staff at Kloefkorn.  We learned a lot from this exercise. The hot wash immediately afterwards was productive, and as the more complete after action review takes place, I have no doubt that what we learned will help us in the future--not only in the event of an unthinkable crisis like this scenario, but also in the smaller emergencies we deal with on a daily basis.

My personal take-away was this: communication is the key. Police and fire personnel have got to work hand-in-glove in uncertain circumstances. Sharing information quickly and thoroughly is vital. We need to do all we can to assure that everyone is aware of the situation on the ground in a dynamic event that is unfolding rapidly, so that we can determine when it is reasonably safe to extricate victims and get medical care to the patients'side.

Thanks to everyone who participated and helped.

Yes, I can elaborate

A comment yesterday asked if I could elaborate on Lincoln Fire & Rescue's use of an "alternate response vehicle": a smaller, lighter vehicle like a pickup equipped with basic tools and medical equipment. This topic was in the news yesterday. After a couple of years as Public Safety Director, I now feel that I can do so.

The trend towards deploying these kinds of vehicles is not unique to Lincoln. It is going on nationwide, as more and more fire departments are beginning to respond to the changing nature of the work and the imperative of adapting to the new reality in municipal services, which simply put is this: the account is not unlimited, and no one is running for office on a platform of  "I will raise your taxes, so government can continue to do what it knows is in your best interest."

About 76% of all the incidents that Lincoln Fire & Rescue rolls on are medical emergencies. Not only do they not require a huge and expensive fire truck or fire engine burning diesel fuel at 4 MPG, in some ways driving one of these large vehicles is an impediment to an urgent response, rather than an advantage. Sending a truck or engine to a "man down, nature unknown" call (something that happens hundreds of times annually), or to a broken tibia at a softball complex, is akin to sending a SWAT team to a noise disturbance call, based on the theory that it could be a gang war, rather than a loud party. I am sold on the need for a fairly sizable contingent of firefighters and paramedics for medical emergencies, but the type of vehicle they arrive in is for the most part irrelevant to the outcome.

Firefighters have an exceptional ability to think about, plan for, and train for every possible contingency. It is both a worthwhile skill, and an Achilles heel at the same time (isn't that true of most talents?) But in reality, the chance of a fire company catching a call that requires the big rig while on the way back from the senior center or ball field is quite remote. With the exception of rescue calls, almost all medical emergencies can be dealt with sans the engine or truck. For the rare contingency where more or different resources are  needed, every firefighter and every rig is equipped with a radio, and there are a few dozen colleagues ready to spring into action at an instant's notice.

The checkbook isn't unlimited, and the ARV is a reasonable response to reality. Early on in my new role as PSD, I overheard a firefighter make a remark that I have now heard repeatedly, both at LF&R and at other agencies: "Firefighting: 200 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress." While not entirely true, I must admit that firefighting is more change-averse than most professions, and it cannot continue on a trajectory like this for long.

Adapt or wither. The choice is clear.

Future trajectory

I was the keynote speaker this week at a technology summit hosted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police in conjunction with their annual Law Enforcement Information Management conference. My job was to set the stage for the conference by describing the path of technology in policing: where have we come from, where are we today, and where might we be headed.

I began with the adoption of the telephone beginning in the late 1890s (including a slide showing my key ring), proceeded through fingerprint examination, the automobile, two way radio, speed radar, polygraph, computer database, NLETS, 911 systems, cellular telephones, DNA testing, mobile data computers, smartphones, CCTV and more--all in an hour.  Here was one of my final slides, identifying several continuing trends I see in public safety technology:

As the summit continued, we had a great discussion of a variety of issues that confront us as the pace of technology inevitably moves us further and faster down the road.

Oklahoma City

Several dozen Lincoln Fire & Rescue employees are in the Oklahoma City area assisting in aftermath or Monday's devastating tornado strikes in The suburbs of Newcastle and Moore. The firefighters are part of Nebraska Task Force One, one of 28 Urban Search and Rescue Teams in the United States.

These teams, hosted by local agencies like Lincoln Fire & Rescue, are funded and equipped by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and are called upon for a rapid response to disasters in exchange for the training, equipment, and capability FEMA provides.  These are a tremendous local resource should the need ever occur locally here in Lincoln.

USAR teams have specialized expertise in search and rescue operations where structural collapse has occurred and/or still threatens.  Although the team is composed largely of firefighters and firefighter/paramedics, it also includes medical personnel, structural engineers, and canine teams.

This is a real opportunity to help the local emergency responders in the Oklahoma City area with trained and equipped professionals with both expertise and experience.  We should all be proud in Lincoln for being able to make this Commitment.  You can read more about Nebraska Task Force One here.

Good news of the week

It looks like water restrictions in Lincoln, which I expected to go into effect quite early this year, are not going to be needed just yet.  That's certainly good news for the police, who shouldered the brunt of the workload (and the criticism) last year--hardly what one ordinarily considers to be the job of the police.

BAC calculator

The National Transportation Safety Board's recommendation this week that states consider dropping the legal limit for driving while intoxicated from a blood alcohol level of .08% to .05% was big news all over the country.  I spotted an article in our local press today:

"That's about one drink for a woman weighing 120 pounds, two for a 160-pound man. A "drink" means 12 ounces of beer, four ounces of wine"

I don't claim to be the world's foremost expert, but I immediately recognized that something important was omitted here. The missing ingredient is time.  It takes time to drink, and BAC is basically a math problem between the amount of ethanol, body mass, and time.  Basically, your body can't metabolize the alcohol in one standard drink (about a half ounce of pure ethanol) every hour, so if you consume a drink every hour over a period of time, your BAC slowly starts to build up. If you drink faster than one per hour, the concentration of alcohol builds up more quickly. It has nothing to do with tolerance, it's just math. 

If the 160 lb. man drank two 12 oz. standard American beers evenly during his first hour of drinking, he would be at about .025% to .035% at the end of that hour--not .05%. It is however, true that the third beer in hour one might put him over .05% at the end of an hour--it would be close. If he drank four in hour one, he'd be getting perilously close to the current legal limit of .08%, as he would with six in three hours. Throttle back to five Buds during a three hour televised football game, though, and he is still comfortably below .08%. Since he has slowed his consumption, his liver is dealing a bit more effectively with his mouth, though still not at equilibrium. 

My favorite online blood alcohol calculator is the Drink Wheel, from Intoximeters, Inc.--the company that manufactured the gas chromatographs I was trained to use a long time ago. The flame ionization detector and the Poropak Q column are still on the tip of my 37 degree Celsius tongue, 38 years later.  It's called the drink wheel because long before the PC and decades before the Internet, the drink wheel was a circular contraption made of two discs of card stock that you could rotate around to select weight, beverage, and time to produce an estimate. Sure wish I had saved one of those gizmos. We used to hand them out right and left.

It is, however, only an estimate.  Govern yourself accordingly, and err on the side of caution.

Not entirely unusual

A youtube video of a dust-up at bar break in Lincoln last Saturday night (which was actually 2:23 AM Sunday morning) was getting a bit of attention from the media yesterday.  The video shows a couple of small fights, a few women exchanging blows, a couple of people stumbling drunk in the street and sidewalk, and a group of police officers, calmly and professionally trying to disperse the crowd.

As he leaves the area, the videographer warns a couple pedestrians headed the opposite direction to be careful "There's a #@!&+ riot going on over there!" Well, not exactly, but certainly a tense street scene that was expertly handled by the officers, with no one being hurt, and without the police action becoming the flashpoint for an even bigger brouhaha.

Many people who have seen it are somewhat shocked by the scene, but Assistant Chief Brian Jackson and I were remarking how typical it really is.  The scuffle may be a little larger than usual, but these kinds of scenes occur from time to time at bar break in similar areas all over the world. I've blogged about this problem on several past occasions.  In Lincoln, this occurs at 14th & O Streets, where the bars that cater to the young, hard drinking crowd are congregated.  Keeping your cool when surrounded by this kind of behavior is not an easy task. Well done, officers.