I am an Agressive Driver Monday, March 9, 2009  -                 One of the things that I have learned over the last 15 years of interviewing, teaching and lecturing apparatus operators is that they did not do just one thing wrong one day and get into trouble. Patrick’s story is very similar to most operators that through a number of years, through a series of learned bad behaviors and because of poor attitudes, these operators end up in what we call the big one, that catastrophic wreck.                 One of Patrick’s early mentors was the apparatus operator that no one wanted to ride with, the guy that always had the apparatus on two wheels around every corner that he drove around.What is interesting that everywhere I go to teach a class we talk about this dangerous driver and it seems that every fire department has at least one operator like this, yet no one seems to be able to do anything about it! In this case not only did we have one dangerous driver but he was mentoring other drivers to be just as dangerous, including Patrick. So by the officers in the fire department not confronting the problem in a timely fashion it just got incrementally worse.                 Another point that was made is throughout Patrick’s driving career, driver training was minimal and transparent at best. As we learned in the Mock Trial some training is what we refer to as paper training where an officer will sign off that the firefighter received the training when that firefighter may not have received the training or only parts of the training, but do to requirements the operators is credited with having received the training to allegedly protect the department.                 Finally I think the most serious problem, one quite frankly I had never even heard of until I met Patrick, was how he viewed his near misses. Rather then him feeling like the aggressive, dangerous driver that he was he viewed himself as a very good driver to the point of, thank god I drove today a lesser operator would have wrecked the apparatus at the near miss that I just had. Again I have been doing this a long time and I had never heard of anything like that. Patrick’s revelations about his near misses is probably the single most serious problem that the fire service faces today as it relates to driving emergency vehicles. Much of the driver training that we do must focus on changing the driver’s attitude. Then and only then can we break the cycle of aggressive, dangerous drivers.