February 2008
Strut Systems Revolutionize Vehicle Stabilization, by Lyn Bixby ..continued from page 1 Over the years, he said his work with vehicle stabilization and extrication became a love-hate relationship. “I like developing the equipment for it and I like the training,” he said, “but I hate the actual rescue because of the dead people and the hurt people.”
Pasto sold his company in 2004, but he maintains a relationship with it as a trainer and consultant, still working on refinements to the equipment he developed.
Rewarding Business He said he finds the rescue business far more rewarding than making tools for construction contractors. “It’s great to make somebody’s job easier,” he said, “but it’s a lot better to save a life.”
While Pasto was developing his Res-Q-Jack on the East Coast, a firefighter on the West Coast named Tim O’Connell was pursuing stabilization ideas of his own that would lead to a similar product.
O’Connell is a technology buff who had been in the U.S. Navy, serving on nuclear submarines during the late 1970s and early 1980s. When he left the Navy, he became a volunteer firefighter in Chico, Calif., got interested in extrication and became the first instructor in the area.
“Stabilization was really just one of those stupid things you had to do a little bit of before you started using the big sexy tools,” he said.
Dash Roll Inspiration The inspiration for his first tool came while encountering problems associated with dash rolls. “You’d go to push from the base of the B pillar and your ram, instead of pushing the dash up, would punch back down through the base of the B pillar because it would be all rusted out,” he said. “So I invented a product which we still sell, it was called a ram plate.”
The plate, he said, was developed in the 1980s to give rams a solid base of support on rocker panels. Like Pasto, he began making his product for neighboring fire departments. He left the area for a few years, and when he returned in the 1990s firefighters had named his product O’Connell plates. He decided to go into business and formed Rescue 42 in 1995. He saw other possibilities for what he decided to call the O-Plate.
“Since I was going to make something to carry, I decided to make it do other things, one of which was being a big hook that you could pull things with,” he said. “We were out playing, and we ended up taking a 4-by-4 and putting it down in that big hook and using a come-along and pushing against a car to stabilize it.”
O’Connell had created a tensioned buttress using his O-Plate, but found it cumbersome to carry 4-by-4s. “We started playing with different ideas and different materials,” he said, “and we finally settled on steel signpost because it was extendable.”
His company started selling its TeleCribbing Stabilization System in 2000. A year later, spurred by Res-Q-Jack’s equipment, O’Connell added a strut jack, but his was detachable because he said jacks are rarely needed in vehicle stabilization.
“If you’ve got an 8-strut system and you’re carrying one jack versus carrying 8 jacks, you’ve just eliminated several hundred pounds of weight,” he said, “and you’ve eliminated several thousands of dollars worth of cost and you’ve eliminated several square feet of storage space.”
He said it was not long before he began looking at advanced composite materials because he wanted to make his struts lighter, stronger and less prone to corrosion, as well as adding a safety factor because a composite strut would not conduct electricity.
“One of the key things in my philosophy is I have eliminated as many ways for a firefighter to make a mistake as I possibly can,” he said. “A frequent problem is vehicle crashes into power poles with energized wires in vicinity of the crash. Something that always made me nervous was a guy with an 8-foot steel pole walking around a car at 2 in the morning in a rain storm or a snow storm and maybe he hasn’t seen that wire.”
Rescue 42 made its first composite system in 2004 and late last year upgraded to a more advanced composite material that incorporates Kevlar.
Meanwhile, O’Connell’s competitor, Res-Q-Jack, is offering a new product this year it calls the X Strut, which is made out of aluminum and has a detachable jack. It is billed a lighter weight, heavy-duty, multi-purpose tool that can be transformed from a shoring strut to a lifting strut in seconds.
Tripling Sales There are more than a half-dozen brands of vehicle stabilization struts on the market – some made by manufacturers whose primary product lines are geared toward building collapse and trench rescue – but Rescue 42 and Res-Q-Jack have distanced themselves from the competition. Rescue 42’s most popular kit sells for about $3,000. Res-Q-Jack’s kits range in price from $2,000 to about $10,000.
Pasto said Res-Q-Jack has tripled its sales since he sold the company in 2004. O’Connell declined to talk about his sales volume, except to say that Res-Q-Jack’s impressive growth has been “significantly stunted” by Rescue 42.
Getting firefighters to try vehicle stabilization struts has not been easy, according to the manufacturers. “For the most part people said, I don’t see the need for that,” O’Connell said. “So one of our main challenges was education. There are tens of thousands of our videos and DVDs out there that we put out free to educate and inform departments that there are better ways to do things.”
The Wow Factor Ron Moore advises fire departments interested in buying stabilization struts to begin by evaluating their needs and how much they are willing to spend.
“You can come up with a plan based on your budget to do a two or three or four strut system, with four functional struts and all the accessories being what I would consider the high end,” he said. “Once you decide what you want to spend, then you have to see these systems for real and compare their ability to stabilize a car against what you already have in your inventory.”
The demonstration and comparison, he said, will be dramatic.
“Once a fire department sees and feels and goes through an actual deployment in a training scenario,” Moore said, “the wow factor alone will let them know, we’ve got to have this, this is the real deal, we’ve got to have this.” |
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