Riding the Tailboard
We are ringing in the New Year by rerunning one of our favorite episodes of all time, which originally aired in January 2017. It might seem strange now, but firefighters dying from falling off fire trucks used to be a huge problem\u2014from 1977 to 1987, an average of nearly four firefighters\xa0died this way each year.\xa0That all changed after the 1987 publication of NFPA 1500, the first fire service occupational safety standard. In this episode, we talk to fire service veterans who used to \u201cride the tailboard,\u201d to learn how a few sentences in a big standard changed 200 years of tradition in the fire service and likely saved dozens of lives. Then, on a new Code Corner, engineer Robin Zevotek talks about the building evacuation strategies outlined in NFPA 101\xd2, Life Safety Code\xd2.
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LINKS:
Read \u2018We Drove Like We Were Crazy,\u2019 an oral history of the creation of NFPA 1500, published in the January 2017 issue of NFPA Journal.