Deaf Firefighter’s Blog

(EVOC = Emergency Vehicle Operators Course)

On Saturday, my department had their EVOC class. While training is a fact of life for those of us in emergency services, this was particularly exciting because it offered me the opportunity to learn about defensive driving AND drive a fire truck for the first time. In fact, I’m the first deaf person I know of that has driven a fire truck in southeastern PA, period.

(me driving Squad 18)

What we basically had to do was navigate a course of cones. The first part of the exercise had us driving down a narrow corridor where there is only about 6 inches of clearance on either side of the truck. This is hard because the driver is so high up, it’s impossible to see the front of the rig. Also, it took a minute or two to get an idea of just how close to the truck the left side cones needed to be in order to have clearance for the right side. Unfortunately, 4 cones met their untimely flattening during this phase.

While driving forward may sound tough, we had to stop and drive back down this corridor in reverse. Most people would think this is harder than driving forward but when you’ve got properly set mirrors, it’s actually EASIER because you can position the mirrors to see the wheels and line the truck up accordingly. I’m proud to brag that while backing down the corridor and into a parking spot, no cones were harmed.

The next part of the course was a serpentine course where you had to weave the trucks through cones. Both forward and reverse. We started by driving in reverse through the course and this was tricky for many people because it requires you to look into the mirror that’s on the opposite side of where you’re turning (where most people tend to look into the mirror of the direction they’re going). Not easy. While I spared cones from punishment while backing up, I did severely injure one of the orange fellas when driving forward. God bless ‘im.

The next two sections were a lane-change maneuver and a parallel parking exercise. No cones down, but may I take a moment here? When I took my driver’s test at the age of 17, if it wasn’t for a sympathetic evaluator who passed me in spite of my inability to complete the parallel parking part of the test even after 4 tries, I’d still be riding mass transit today. My wife will roll her eyes, get out of the car and tell me to catch up with her if I have to parallel park our little minivan.

So to maneuver a 23 foot long fire truck into a parking spot represents a HUGE stroke of luck for me. As the late great Steve Irwin would say:

“Beauty Mate!”

Anyway: the final part of the challenge was to drive the truck down a narrowing corridor from 6 inches of clearance on either side to about 1 1/2 inches. No cones were flattened.

This was a great exercise for a lot of reasons. 1) it showed the guys that this is something else I can do as a deaf FF. 2) I personally had a gut feeling that I could do it but it’s a real confidence boost to actually DO it. 3) Respect the cones, folks. They put their structural integrity on the line for us emergency responders and for you guys.