Tuesday morning, February 2, a volunteer firefighter in Florida was hit by a train while was suppressing a vegetation fire near 1491 14th St. NW in Fort Meade. The injury occurred on a fire that burned three to four acres along the railroad tracks, mostly in grass.
According to WFLA News Channel 8 the fire had been contained and structures were saved, but as a CSX train approached, “The firefighter saw that the door was open on one of their trucks, so he ran over to shut the door of the truck, but the train arrived at about the same time he made it to the truck.”
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office reported the Fort Meade firefighter was transported to a hospital where he was treated for a broken leg.
The cause of the fire was not released, but from my experience it is common in some areas for trains to ignite fires adjacent to their tracks, started by hot carbon particles from the exhaust or brake failure.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Matt.
This was a failure in situational awareness despite the crew noticing the approaching locomotive and consist, the awareness that failed here was the ability to judge time, speed, and distance of an approaching object on a horizontal approach, something that humans have considerable difficulty with.
Despite being planes apes, our ancestors were also arboreal, our brains are equipped to comprehend spatial relationships and perform more accurate threat and risk assessment in a three dimensional arena, yet when ab object is approaching head on or distancing away, our brains have more difficulty — which might have been the root cause of this injury.
Three thoughts occur simultaneously:
Best wishes, prayers and good karma to this firefighter for a speedy and full recovery.
Never try to beat a train, anywhere, any time.
“A Florida man…”
🙂 Locomotives usually win, when it comes to inertia. However fire crews are under extreme pressure to save or salvage costly equipment which, in a world of budget reductions and getting fired for the least reason, crews are highly motivated to risk themselves to save hardware — which is exactly wrong, fire crews nearly always never take risks, they retreat.
Sounds as if the most basic rule of operating next to train tracks never happened: calling their dispatch and stopping trains until safely mopped up, and/or not parking in proximity of said-hazard…
Exactly Karl; 1. Initial Attack Incident Commander making those notification(s) to agencies, local jurisdictions, land owners of their emergency vegetation fire pending completion or control. 2. Better placement of emergency equipment, better planning and being proactive. Prayers for the firefighter toward back to good health.
Yes, and CSX has a phone number one may call to stall consists anywhere on their right of ways. I did the Temporary Speed Restriction software for the Northeast Corridor along Amtrak’s passenger right of way, the system immediately dispatches TSRs to locomotives for planned and unplanned fouling of the right of way, so perhaps the root cause here was not a loss of situational awareness but a missed step of not contacting the Class 1 rail line.