Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Cameras installed in emergency vehicles

Clearwater Fire & Rescue purchased 19 DriveCams for its vehicles to help modify driving behavior and prevent accidents.

By TIFFANI SHERMAN
Published January 2, 2007

CLEARWATER - Think of all of the things you do while you drive and how many near-misses you have on the road.

Do you sing?

Talk on the phone?

Eat?

Read?

Each of those distractions takes your eyes off the road, putting you and others at risk. Faced with those kind of hazards, Clearwater Fire & Rescue has gone high-tech to keep an eye on its drivers and keep them and other motorists safe on the road.

Clearwater recently used money from a grant to become the first fire department in the Tampa Bay area to buy DriveCams, small devices that record audio and video if an emergency vehicle brakes hard, swerves or has a collision.

The devices are being mounted near the rearview mirrors in 19 Fire & Rescue vehicles.

"The cameras store an inside and an outside view of a certain incident," said Richard Riley, Fire & Rescue chief of operations.

They're always on, but an event triggers the camera to save the 10 seconds of data before the event and the 10 seconds after.

"We can take a look back and review exactly what happened," Riley said.

He said he's concerned not with punishing drivers but with what causes crashes and whether department policies and procedures work. Riley drove with a DriveCam while he was with the fire department in Fairfax County, Va., and will have one installed in his Clearwater car.

In 2005, fire department vehicles nationwide were involved in 15,885 collisions while responding to or returning from calls, 28 of them in Clearwater.

Not all were serious, but many of them could have been prevented. That's the goal of installing the DriveCams, said Clearwater Fire & Rescue spokeswoman Elizabeth Daly.

"DriveCams will not only make it safer for firefighters but for the community as well," she said. "Anything that will help increase safety, we're all about it."

DriveCam of San Diego began in February 1998 after its founder was involved in a road rage incident in which someone threw a brick through his window. He wanted to record what led up to an event and what happened after, should it ever happen to him again.

The company has evolved since then, now primarily focusing on changing driver behavior to help them keep their eyes on the road.

"We use it as a behavior modification tool to hopefully prevent accidents," said Bruce Moeller, 51, president and chief executive officer of DriveCam.

He said once a camera is in place and drivers see what they do, they'll want to change.

"When you realize what behavior is actually going on, you would be remiss and negligent to not do anything about it," Moeller said.

The DriveCam software is designed to pick out patterns so clients can coach people to be better drivers.

"You are literally modifying human behavior with respect to driving," Moeller said. "People are paying attention when they know somebody is watching."

More than 1,300 organizations nationwide have installed DriveCams, totaling more than 50,000 units in vehicles. Many of those agencies are fire and police departments and ambulance services.

Moeller said the frequency and severity of accidents has gone down with all 1,300 customers. This saves taxpayers money, he said, because cities have to pay fewer insurance claims.

Each camera costs about $1,300. Clearwater Fire & Rescue received a $15,000 grant from Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. to pay for the cameras. Since the company's grant program began in 2004, Fireman's Fund has donated $10-million to fire departments nationwide to buy equipment like DriveCams, thermal imaging cameras, hoses, breathing apparatus and more. In Florida, those grants have totaled $248,781 since April.

"It's our philanthropic mission to support fire departments," said Fireman's Fund media relations manager Atle Erlingsson. "We've always been supporters of the fire services."

Riley acknowledged that some drivers might see the cameras as intrusive, but the results will be worth it.

"We can review an incident to see if we followed our policies and to see if we need to change our policies and to see if it was a preventable or nonpreventable accident," Riley said. "It's going to make Clearwater firefighters more safety conscious than they already are."

19 Number of Clearwater Fire & Rescue vehicles being fitted with cameras.

15,885 Collisions that occurred nationwide while fire department vehicles were responding to emergencies.

28 Number of those that were in Clearwater.

1,300 Number of organizations that have installed DriveCams.

50,000 Number of units installed.

$1,300 About how much each camera costs.

$15,000 Amount of a grant that Clearwater Fire & Rescue received from the Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. to pay for the cameras.

[Last modified January 2, 2007, 06:01:29]