Interview with Pat Gallagher

With 26 years of experience in the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP), there are few more experienced in highway safety than Pat Gallagher. As an incident management consultant, Gallagher has seen it all when it comes to safety and accident prevention. “I've been in some way, shape or form, in traffic safety or traffic enforcement for many, many years. I enjoy this type of work. My goal is to make sure that everybody goes home at the end of their shift every day. I don't need any more than that,” Gallagher has said in a recent interview we had with him.

While Pat originally joined NHP in 1990, he did not get seriously involved with traffic safety until the mid-2000s when he was called upon to represent the NHP in a new pilot program: Traffic Incident Management, or TIM.

Gallagher was skeptical at first: “I was the rookie junior captain, a position where you get the unglamorous jobs and so I didn't think anything of it. When the consultant showed up, they started to tell me how badly my troops were working and that they weren't doing a good job, that they were leaving crashes on the roads too long.

I very politely said: ‘Thank you very much. I appreciate you guys coming in, and you can leave now.’ I didn't want to talk to them anymore. About an hour later, I got a call again from my chief. It was an interesting phone call, to put it politely. Thus, I was put back on the assignment and had to welcome them with open arms.”

Soon after, though, Gallagher warmed up to the program as he saw more preventable incidents on the road: “I take that to heart. You know, when we lose a responder or anybody that's working roadside, whether it's a road maintenance worker or someone out picking up road debris, freeway service patrol or tow operators getting struck and killed, we just can't have it.”

TIM aims to resolve, or, at the very least, reduce the number of work zone fatalities on highways and roadsides. The core of the program is training, specifically, a four-hour, free training course for first responders. “We do it through a contract with the Nevada Department of Transportation, and we'll train any discipline that's working roadside. It’s worked well so far and to date we've trained 77% of all first responders in the state of Nevada since 2013.”

The program has been remarkably successful in reducing roadside collisions for first responders, and it is through his involvement with TIM that Gallagher came across a great solution to these preventable work zone incidents: Roadquake temporary portable rumble strips (TPRS).

“We started seeing these crashes that were remarkably similar in nature. Cars parked, people out of the cars on the highway, then a commercial vehicle comes in and crashes into these folks that were outside their vehicles… We had a string of fatal crashes like this in work zones on US 6.” Due to the similarities in these crashes, Gallagher knew something could be done to prevent them. “Working with traffic operations at NDOT, the TIM folks asked what we could do to make these work zones safer. Somebody suggested we needed to use some sort of rumble strip; that's when we started doing the research.”

To justify the cost and effort of implementing a new rumble strip system, some testing on their effectiveness would need to be done. “We decided to measure the speeds of these vehicles coming into the work zone before the rumble strips get put down and compare them to the speeds afterwards. We bought all the DOT maintenance folks these nice, ‘point-and-shoot’ radar guns so that the DOT guys could measure the speeds before and after deployment. They were able to measure the speeds a lot more effectively than a police car out there, because they were technically camouflaged, and so people would not slow down when they saw them.”

The results? A significant decrease in speed when approaching work zones.

“It wasn't a huge amount of speed reduction that I remember, like 15 or 20 miles an hour, but that is the biggest thing. We always talk about how the main goal is just to get those drivers’ attention; they hit those rumble strips, and they'll look up and they're like ‘oh, I'm in a work zone now. I need to start slowing down.’”

While TPRS implementation can be viewed as expensive, it pales in comparison to the real-world economic loss of a human life:

“The latest report I remember seeing was that a single fatal crash on average costs $11 million. Now, they determine that by how long the roadway has been shut down and therefore you don't have commerce moving through your community. They also figure out what the cost is for the first responders, all the medical costs, and how many first responder agencies were out there and the general cost for that,” Gallagher remarks.

Not only does a single community suffer, but the long-term economy suffers as a result: “they estimate total loss of income for that individual that was killed in that collision, what their lost income would have been throughout their lifetime. I think when I first started in TIM it was around the 6 million per fatal crash, and now it's over 11 million per crash.”

As a result of using Roadquake, Texas has seen a dramatic drop in work zone fatalities, to the point where a member of the State DOT personally approached our president and CEO, David E. Cowan, to thank him. He said, “when there has been an accident or a fatality, it is my job to notify the families; anywhere we have used your product I did not have to make that call."

It is easy to look at a new system or safety purchase with skeptical eyes: ‘Can we do it cheaper? Is this necessary? There must be an alternative’...however, this mindset often leads to preventable tragedies, dealing massive financial and emotional damage to agencies, communities, and families.

This sentiment is core to Gallagher’s, TIM’s, and PSS’s values, and he often uses a line that sums it up perfectly: “if it’s predictable, it’s preventable.”