Winter Weather and Slide Off's, Do You Help?

When your districts are hit with winter weather do the members of your department mobilize to help stranded motorists? I know our local county rescue will take their rescue truck out and pull people out of the ditch so that the county deputies can respond to accidents needing reports.

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Permalink Reply by Todd on December 20, 2009 at 10:34pm

We don't have much winter weather, and when we do we don't pull people out of ditches.

I have, however, checked out all stranded vehicles we encountered while returning from other calls just to ensure that they had help on the way, etc.

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Permalink Reply by Trainer on December 21, 2009 at 6:45am

Absolutely NOT! This is fiscally irresponsible, and the liability involved would kill a department, pun intended, sorry but our $300,000 fire truck didn't come with a hook. Usually when this happens, ice or the first snow, when we get called it's a stop to check if everyone is OK then down the road to the next, dispatch already has called the tow. Back in the good-ol...boy days, a setting chief took our old truck out to help some locals when the building next to the station caught fire, needless to say the members were stunned when the doors were opened...no truck, building was lost, chief was only demoted and we now have an SOG on this, I don't miss those days...course that was way before my time.

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Permalink Reply by RJ SEIPLE on December 21, 2009 at 1:00pm

No, we will do what we can do for them, to include waiting for the wrecker to show up. But we will not pull anyone out. The liability is to high, and in our sue happy country, you place the department and the city in a very bad situation. We can barely get money for training & equipment, so we dang sure don't want anyone to sue us, as a result of damage done to the vehicle.

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Permalink Reply by Zeke Harman on December 21, 2009 at 1:13pm

Yea we do last friday we brought out the ol hawk extreme to pull out a heavy duty wrecker that was tryiong to pull and big truck out of a ditch but he went in himself and we took our winch line on our firetruck and pulled the wrecker out