First responders constantly put their lives on the line, but the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) is trying to make incidents safer for the men and women with boots on the ground.
In conjunction with Crash Responder Safety Week, ALDOT is hosting Traffic Incident Management (TIMs) classes across the state, teaching responders how to correctly manage a scene.
The classes help everyone involved to know what each responder is doing. Responders can then adjust accordingly to get a crash scene off the road quicker and safer.
Class attendees will talk through their unique perspectives, additionally sharing a viewpoint that a different first responder may have never thought about.
Ken Colvert, ALDOT’s Traffic Management Center manager, knows firsthand about learning a different perspective because he’s been through it himself.
“In the first meeting we were at, I was asked why we park our firetrucks in different ways,” Colvert said. “That started an entirely different conversation. We see stuff like that in every class we teach. We ask each other questions and start to understand each other and why we do things the way we do. That opens eyes and teaches how to help each other the best way on the scene. Everyone on the scene must be on the same page.”
Minor crashes can become a major problem
The chance of a secondary crash increases by 2.8% for every minute an incident is in the roadway. Often, these secondary crashes are worse and more deadly than the initial incident. Sixty-five incident responders working a crash were struck and killed nationally in 2021.
In the United States, crashes injure an incident responder every two days and kill an incident responder every six days. The towing industry is 15 times deadlier than all other private industries combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“A lot of fatal crashes are because of already stopped traffic,” ALDOT’s Regional Transportation Management Center (RTMC) Manager Glenn Taylor said. “At an hour, you’re well over 100% that something else will happen. The TIMs effort is to manage the scene with a sense of urgency. We want to move stuff off the road to prevent that secondary incident from happening.”
Roughly 70% of the police department in North Alabama has gone through TIMs. ALDOT has held a training in every county in the North region, while some counties have hosted more than one training.
“We’re trying to teach responders how to save themselves and set up the scene as correctly as they can,” Colvert said. “We can replace equipment and replace a police car. We can’t replace a person. We’re doing this because we care about responders.”
First responders who would like to attend the class or other classes around the state can request or sign up for TIMs training at www.alabamatim.org.
