For 2002, authorities documented seven U.S. firefighter fatalities due to being struck by moving vehicles; of those, five occurred while the firefighters were working in or near moving traffic at fire or traffic accident scenes.

Of the 57 U.S. firefighter line-of-duty deaths reported by mid-August of this year, two were moving-traffic "struck-by" incidents. On March 18, 2003, 20-year-old Lance Mathew, a firefighter with the LaBelle-Fannett, TX, Fire Department was struck by an 18-wheeler at 3 A.M. while crossing Interstate 10. He had responded in his personal vehicle to a minor collision on the highway and arrived ahead of the emergency vehicles.

Thirty-one days later, in Medford, NJ, 63-year-old Woodrow Pinkerton succumbed to injuries sustained when he was struck by a car while controlling traffic on State Highway 70 at the scene of a motor vehicle accident on a foggy morning. The accident was the fifth in a series of 10 accidents in just over an hour that morning.

Series Overview

Photo by Ron Moore If this is how your department currently operates while working in or near moving traffic, you are prime candidates to be victims of the next “struck-by” incident.

As our line-of-duty death statistics continue to show with each passing year, working in or near moving traffic places responders at significant risk of injury or death. Regardless of whether you volunteer your services or are paid for what you do, when you are at a crash or fire scene and are working in or near moving traffic, you are considered a "highway worker" and fall under federal Department of Transportation (DOT) standards and regulations. The content of these national regulations is just now becoming known to the fire service and the impact of these federal highway standards is beginning to have an effect on our incident scene operations. This first University of Extrication article of the safe parking series will introduce these standards and provide an overview of their content.