The cause of the vehicle stall was an EPA mandated device meant to reduce diesel emissions. If the emissions toxicity gets too high warning lights start blinking and if not corrected, the device turns off the engine.
Another ambulance was dispatched to offload the passenger from the disabled vehicle, but that caused a delay. The injured person, Nathaniel McRae, 34, who was shot by D.C. police, was dead by the time the second ambulance arrived at Howard University Hospital.
The EPA in May of last year, after getting complaints from other fire departments, waived the automatic shutdown requirements on the new diesels, but only for fire engines and ambulances.
You would think that it is only common sense to not have emergency vehicles shutting down because of smelly exhaust...or any vehicle. What if you are on an urgent quest in a private conveyance? Do you really want to be stranded because the feds think warning lights are not enough?
What is more important, the health of your pregnant wife in the backseat minutes from delivering your daughter, or a whoopee cushion amount of unscrubbed emissions escaping into the troposphere?
Couldn't the masterminds at the EPA see that just this sort of thing would eventually happen? Yep. But they went ahead and decided to push the brave-new-world order, anyway.
They've backed off, a little, for now. But I don't think they've given up on the idea that whether your car shuts down and leaves you alone and stranded on a dark chilly rainy moonless night in the lawless part of town, or on a deserted highway; that that decision is best left to them.
Read more about it at the link below.
ambulance breakdown
No comments:
Post a Comment