Public Employee Press

State-of-the-art training saves lives

By ALFREDO ALVARADO

Built during the Civil War to defend the East River entrance to New York Harbor, Fort Totten sits above Long Island Sound at the Queens end of the Throgs Neck Bridge. Its military architecture makes it one of New York City’s historic landmarks.

Today, Fort Totten is a city park and the home of one of the most sophisticated training centers in the country for ambulance crews. The guiding force behind Fort Totten’s superb training program for the Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics of the Fire Dept. of New York is Lt. Robert Raheb.

“I’m very proud of this facility and the training that we offer,” says Raheb, a 25-year FDNY veteran and a member of Uniformed Emergency Medical Service Officers Local 3621. All EMTs and Paramedics are required to take the seven-day Emergency Vehicle Operators Course (EVOC), which Lt. Raheb was responsible for developing.

What makes the Fort Totten training facility unique is its one-of-a-kind ambulance simulator. Equipped with the latest computer technology, the simulator was purchased with a $750,000 grant from NASCAR in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Raheb served on the research committee that gathered information from corporations around the country for a year to help decide which driving simulator to buy and how it would be designed. The committee finally chose a company from Michigan.

Students sit in the driver’s seat of the simulator as if they were in a giant video game — dodging cars, trucks and pedestrians who ignore their piercing siren and dart into the roadway or racing down dark, rain-soaked streets with tires screeching and horns blaring.
Lt. Raheb, a master computer scriptwriter, helped write the software programming for the simulator. He credits the rigorous training with helping to reduce collisions on the street.
“Our collisions have been reduced by 14 percent overall, and by 37 percent at intersections,” he announced proudly.

This kind of performance has motivated fire departments from across the country and around the world to come and visit the facility.

Streets are safer
The improved performance on the road is critical in a city where the emergency system receives 1.3 million calls annually. At 250,000 calls a year, Chicago handles less than one-fifth of that volume.

The students’ performance in the simulator is videotaped by cameras mounted inside. “That way when we review their performance with them, there can’t be any arguments,” he said. It’s not unusual to have students drop out of the program after a couple of sessions on the simulator.
The training center also features a 40,000-square foot obstacle course with 60-foot light towers. Raheb was also involved in the planning and design of the course, which opened in January.

“I was hoping we could make it bigger, but this works fine,” said Raheb, who supervises a staff of 12 instructors. Striving to make things better is second nature to Lt. Raheb. “Our EMTs and Paramedics deserve it,” he said. “And people’s live are at stake.”