Jaws Of Life

A KCRA news item this evening showed how a local city is training their fire department how to use the Jaws Of Life. Apparently, new steel construction and new crash technologies, while saving lives, are also making it harder to extract all those dumbass drivers from their wrecks:



I find it highly ironic that the same fire departments responsible for extracting these people from their crumpled vehicles are the ones enabling people to speed through residential neighborhoods because their fire trucks can't handle some "traffic calming" bumps in the road. Highly ironic.

The training includes how to extract people from hybrids...apparently jawing through the wiring in these vehicles poses a problem for rescuer safety. They'd better get used to it, because we are migrating to hybrid and all electric vehicles faster than you can say Jack Robinson.

All electric vehicles could have been put into service three decades ago, but our NASCAR loving constituency demands power...demands performance...demands acceleration. Yes...these demands will be met with hundreds of thousands of annual calls for the Jaws Of Life to rescue these dumbshits after plowing into trees around residential street corners, or after flipping over while changing lanes on the freeways...in hybrids, in Volts, or in 1984 Plymouth Horizons (my favorite car, by the way).

Boy, I had better sharpen my own driving skills so I don't end up becoming one of these dumbshits myself, eh?

You really think that 40% of our population is going to go out and buy electric cars over the next few years when the price is roughly the same as a new Mercedes? Please. It'll be gasoline power, baby, and that power will push us into 41,000 new deaths each year unthinkingly.