Bergen Record
By PAUL ROGERS, Staff Writer
Date: 02-20-1997, Thursday
WESTWOOD -- For Bobbie Waits and Nick Nardone, it was a nine-month
crusade.
They wrote letters to businesses and residents throughout the town,
spoke to churches and civic and school groups, even stood at traffic
lights to solicit donations from drivers.
With a $5,000 gift from the Westwood Fire Department on Friday -- the
largest contribution of the campaign -- the borough couple finally
reached their goal.
They had raised $25,000 to purchase what experts say is one of the
most important advancements in firefighting history: a helmet that
enables firefighters to see infrared images through walls and thick
smoke while searching for people and animals trapped inside burning
buildings.
"Until I wore it, I didn't believe what it could do," said Larry
Schwarz, the Fire Department's liaison for the project, who tested one
of the helmets last year.
Waits, a semi-retired public relations agent, and Nardone, a retired
Newark police detective, decided to raise money for one of the helmets
in March, after seeing a segment about it on "Dateline NBC."
Administrators of a fund set up by the couple paid a $1,000 deposit
for the helmet this week and will pay the remainder of the cost when
the helmet is delivered, probably within six weeks, Schwarz said. All
of Westwood's 70 volunteer firefighters will be trained to use the
device, he said.
Westwood is the second municipality in New Jersey to purchase one of
the helmets, which are manufactured by Cairns and Brother, a
160-year-old firefighting equipment company in Clifton. The city of
Clifton bought a helmet in the fall, after a grass-roots fund-raising
campaign similar to Westwood's.
The helmet, called the CairnsIRIS (Infrared Imaging System), is fitted
with an infrared heat sensor through which firefighters can see hot
spots and ghostly images of victims behind walls and blinding smoke.
Without the helmet, firefighters must crawl and feel their way through
burning buildings in search of victims, just as firefighters have for
more than a century.
"It's like you're firefighting in Braille," Schwarz said of the
traditional method. "You really can't see anything in front of you,
and to look for somebody, you're on your hands and knees and you're
literally padding the floor in front of you and around you until you
find your victim.
"This gives you the ability to see them."
Cairns and Brother began marketing and selling the new helmets, which
were developed by the military, in March.
Nationwide, fire departments in more than 100 municipalities --
including New York City, Philadelphia, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. --
now own one, said George Batchelor, general manager of the company's
CairnsIRIS division.
In the history of firefighting equipment, the CairnsIRIS is "probably
the most significant [development] of our decade and maybe of this
century," said Larry Stevens, editor of Firefighter News, a monthly
trade magazine based in Carlsbad, Calif.
A CairnsIRIS helmet is believed to have saved a life last month. A
firefighter in Bethesda, Md., who was wearing the helmet rescued a
40-year-old man from a burning home after firefighters who weren't
wearing the helmet had failed to find him, Stevens said.
The television report that inspired the Westwood fund drive detailed
how the lives of three children in Columbus, Ga., could have been
saved had firefighters there been using the infrared helmet. The town
has since purchased one.
Mayor Bernard "Skip" Kelley praised Waits and Nardone for their hours
of hard work in acquiring lifesaving equipment the borough could not
have afforded.
"They poured their hearts into this whole thing," Kelley said.
"If it saves one life," Waits said, "it was worth every moment that
we put into this."
