Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But emergency was a big part of establishing the cultural expectations for what those units would look like. And it looked like lights and sirens to every call. Because every call was all about time.
This is from the second part of the pilot episode, when the skeptical doctor has come around.
He's looking directly into the camera. Right at those 30 million viewers.
Sirens are all over the show. You may recall that the literal theme song of Emergency features sirens. And I think a lot of this time siren obsession is due to the fact that early EMS departments were part of fire departments. And a fire is a very specific kind of emergency. If you don't contain it, it spreads. So every fire is an urgent situation.
And according to FEMA, anecdotally, firefighters use their sirens way more often than the police. But these days, even the fire service in most places seems to be based on an outdated sense of its mission. As of 2023, less than 4% of all 911 calls firefighters responded to were for fires. Most were for EMS and rescue.
So, then it looks like the argument about siren reform broadly applies to firefighters too. The U.S. Fire Administration actually cited a bunch of studies about reducing siren usage just last year. Sirens are dangerous. They save time, but not that much. And things are often less urgent than they appear.
Jeff Jarvis did a massive study on lights and sirens using something called the ESO dataset, a national collection of emergency calls with unbelievably granular data attached.
So this is crucial. Paramedics are responding with lights and sirens to around 86% of calls, when only 7% of them are resulting in a vaguely potentially life-saving intervention. So why were they urgent? That means that in the United States, we're using lights and sirens somewhere between 80% and 90% more often than we need to.
The question I have that I can imagine people who are skeptical might ask is, well, how much do you really know from the call? Can you tell?
And how many did people run hot to?
So I want to play for you again a very specific moment from the pilot episode of Emergency, from the speech that Doctor gave to the legislature about why we need EMS.
But those other things have come along. More doctors. Advances in the ways we take 911 calls. Better and more emergency rooms. Better and more emergency medicine. Better and more paramedics. To use Bayer's formula, we have reduced distance. Paramedic units are all over the place now in a way they just weren't in the world of emergency.
But it seems to me like in our minds and on TV, it's as if nothing has changed since the 1970s. Emergency was the most significant early example of an entire genre of TV show that dramatized the emergency services. Before there was Cops or Rescue 911, there was Emergency. And here's the trick. All of those TV shows are based on the narrative conventions that Emergency pioneered.
A world in which the TV show had not yet done its work and help was always too far away and always came with lights and sirens blaring because that's what firefighters did. And these shows are everywhere. Rescue Me, Sky Med, Live Rescue, Helicopter Heroes, Island Medics, Air Ambulance ER, a show that was literally called Sirens, which is what they'll play on TV in hell for me.
They even make this stuff for kids. This is what Paw Patrol is. Start them young.
So Jarvis, like Beyer, reduced the use of lights and sirens. He cut them by about a third. Did their response time increase? Yes. By a median of six seconds. And in the vast majority of cases, by less.
And I realize this is purely in the realm of hypothesis, but it seems to me commonsensical that were lights and sirens reserved for truly emergency use, you would see a more potent reaction to them. And likely then it could plausibly decrease response times.
I like that hat. That's a very stylish hat you're wearing. So here it is. Lights and sirens are a tool that currently seem to be way overused. And that overuse has real consequences. Most of all, for our burnt out, overstretched first responders who go to work to save lives and wind up responding to everything as if it's a crisis, wearing themselves out and losing their hearing in the process.
In 2015, 1,500 firemen sued that company, Federal Signal, the one that makes the iconic fire siren, for causing mass loss of hearing. A lawyer opposing them said, and I quote, What's their solution? If you don't have sirens, people would get mowed down in the streets. The siren works exactly the way it should. End quote. I could not disagree more. And you know who else disagrees? That's right.
I found him. Okay. I am approaching Davy's house. Which is coincidentally...
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