Moonshine
07-01-2012, 08:46 AM
I just finished spending 9 days teaching an EVOC (Emergency Vehicle Operators Course) to 35 of our officers. After not having done much of anything with the skills we developed in 2011 at the Oklahoma Highway Patrol Law Enforcement Driver Training Instructor Course the department finally had the other instructor and I put this school on. We spent Wed and Thurs last week building our courses, using nearly 700 cones. Friday was a tune up day to knock the rust off our skills, which had atrophied from disuse. The other instructor is the Sgt in Training/Personnel and I'm in CID (detectives) these days, so neither of us spends much time piloting squad cars at speed. Anyway, we started with our first group of students Monday morning and in 8 hours we put them through a .5 mile road course, three shuffle steering skill building exercises, a lateral displacement maneuver, two mirror backing maneuvers, a high speed slalom, and then back to the road course to see how much better they did after instruction. The Crown Vics held up until Wednesday afternoon, when we had a bunch of right front tires worn down to the cords. We changed 5 tires in 21 minutes, and by yesterday morning we had our tire changes down to under two minutes. We also took one of our new Caprice police package cars that showed up the Friday before we started the class. That really is an impressive vehicle, and all the students raved about it. However, to show them that technique triumphes over horsepower the final exercise was to let the students hot lap in the Caprice while an instructor ran from them in a Crown Vic. Without exception, we ran off and hid from them, despite the Caprice's 100 HP advantage, and far superior handling and brakes. We finished up our last group of students yesterday, and after a long, hot week we're beat, but feel like we really provided some valuable training. We got lots of photos and video, so I'll post some pics later in the week. Pavement temps were routinely 135-140, hood temps ran about 190, and we drank about a zillion gallons of Gatorade. Good times.