Some inhabitants, shopkeepers and landowners in the extended neighborhood along Bloomfield Avenue have had it with the frequent, eardrum-rattling sirens of passing ambulances.
Paul Zimmerman, who has an office at the corner of Bloomfield Avenue and Park Street and owns several buildings in Montclair Center, said he loses two or three residential tenants per year, who move out since they’re weary of the seemingly constant, blaring sirens of passing ambulances.
Zimmerman said some first-responders "get so hyped up" when answering calls that they use the sirens unnecessarily and drive at excessive speeds, "putting everybody in their path at greater risk."
Other members of the community are also questioning whether the sirens are being used only when essential.
"We all understand the need for sirens," said Tom Lonergan, the executive director of the Montclair Center Business Improvement District (BID). "We just feel they should only be used in appropriate situations. We’re merely asking for standards, protocols and discretion when using them."
Lonergan said the community wants to make sure the sirens are being utilized "not simply as a convenient excuse to make it from one end of Bloomfield Avenue to the other without stopping for red lights."
He said the neighbors "recognize the need for sirens in critical or life-or-death situations." However, "we think there are some instances when sirens are being used for convenience rather than saving lives."
Scott Kennedy, the chief executive officer of the AlphaGraphics commercial printing business on Bloomfield Avenue, said that sometimes ambulance operators seem to use their sirens for what seems to be no reason.
Kennedy said that on a recent afternoon he was in his car, waiting at a light at the intersection of Park Street and Bloomfield Avenue, when he saw and heard an ambulance on the other side of the road. Oddly, the driver of the emergency vehicle wasn’t moving, but waiting patiently for the light to change, like everybody else, with his lights and sirens turned on.
Kennedy’s 9-year-old daughter was in the car with him, and she asked, "Why doesn’t he go through the red light?"
"Because it’s not an emergency," and drivers have broad discretion over how and when they activate their sirens, Kennedy said.
"When you have an ambulance that’s blaring with paramedics behind them and they get in the other lane, clearly something is going on," said Kennedy. "But when they aren’t trying to pass and going the speed of traffic," he wondered what the point of using the sirens was.
Kennedy said he witnesses that sort of seemingly pointless use of sirens on a daily basis. "It gets old quick," he said.
Doug Giblin, president of the Cedar Grove Ambulance and Rescue Squad, said his drivers are instructed to only utilize sirens in incidents involving victims of stroke or heart problems, burn victims, patients who are in respiratory distress or are unconscious, and in other "critical cases."
Giblin said squad members are told not to use any warning devices, even lights, for non-life-threatening calls, such as broken bones. The sirens are also to be used only when ambulances must go through red lights, according to squad policy, he said.
A Montclair Volunteer Ambulance Unit official said the majority of ambulance calls, at the outset at least, are treated as urgent.
"When someone dials 911, it’s an emergency on some level," said Jonathan Hirsh, vice president of the Montclair Volunteer Ambulance Unit Board of Trustees. Hirsh said it’s "very rare" that such a call does not warrant "a lights-and-sirens response."
Once the crew arrives at the scene, evaluates the situation and stabilizes the patient, then EMTs can exercise more judgment as to whether the patient should also be driven to the hospital with the lights turned on and the sirens going.
Much of the ambulance traffic on Bloomfield Avenue does not consist of MVAU rigs, said the board vice president. When Hirsh was an active EMT from 1993 to 2005, "I tried as hard as I could to avoid" Bloomfield Avenue, as do most MVAU ambulance operators, since the avenue has such heavy traffic, Hirsh said.
Sometimes there is no choice, and since it is such a congested road, it is hard to keep from turning on the sirens, particularly if motorists are not moving out of the way. Complicating the problem is that newer cars are engineered to insulate occupants from outside noise, Hirsh noted.
While he understands that bystanders might be irritated by the noise, "there’s a story on the other side, and that’s an important story to tell."
That is, the siren is being used since someone’s life or health is in jeopardy, he said. "It’s not something that’s taken lightly."
