Dearborn Heights Fire Chief Dave Brogan announces at the Dec. 12 City Council meeting that the department has received a grant for a crash response vehicle and another grant for thermal imaging cameras.
By SUE SUCHYTA
Times-Herald Newspapers
HEIGHTS – Fire Chief Dave Brogan announced receiving two grants at the Dec. 12 City Council meeting, which would facilitate purchase of a crash response vehicle and thermal imaging cameras for firefighters.
The City Council approved the acceptance of both grants.
The Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning grant provides $930,000 for the purchase of a crash response vehicle that is designed to carry specialized rescue equipment. Currently, the department stores its rescue equipment in a separate trailer.
Brogan said the vehicle will allow firefighters to respond more efficiently to rescue events by having the proper equipment in the response vehicle.
“It will have all the technical rescue gear on that one truck,” he said. “That’s too much equipment to go on a traditional firetruck, because we have all of our tools and other tasks we have to do on a firetruck.”
Brogan said the truck would have the jaws of life, as well as equipment to lift up a semi-truck if a car gets buried underneath one.
“This is the ghost of Lisa Martin coming through for us once again,” he said. “It is very unusual to have a grant this large with no match, and we don’t have any match at all.”
EMS Coordinator Lt. Lisa Martin retired in October after 24 years of service with the Fire Department.
The department also received a Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration Workplace Improvement to Safety and Health Grant to purchase 20 thermal imaging cameras, TICs, that would attach to a firefighter’s self-contained breathing apparatus to help find trapped victims, improve firefighter safety and help reduce the spread of fires.
A recent study determined that not having a TIC at a structure fire was the sixth ranked risk factor in firefighter fatalities. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health reported that TICs were not deployed in 38 percent of fatalities.
Brogan said the MIOSHA MIWISH grant would cover 50 percent of the $10,680 cost of the 20 TICs.
“These ones are more personal-sized and they are about $500 each,” he said. “So, a lot of people are going to have them and they will just be more readily available at a fire scene. It makes things safer faster and we can just do things much more efficiently when we have these cameras available to us.”
Brogan said each firefighter with a TIC sees the image right on the unit’s screen connected to their SCBA gear.