Danbury firefighters head out to every call with some high-tech help.
“We have some tremendous technology,” Dep. Chief Bernie Meehan said. “The technology helps us almost every day.”
Just as it did when crews responded to a serious crash on Wooster Heights Road near Lees Farm just before 5 a.m. Sunday. “The car had struck a tree at a very high rate of a speed. It was very obvious there had to be injuries, but there was nobody present,” Meehan explained.
Pictures shared by Meehan with News 12 show a mangled car with the passenger side of the car ripped off. Meehan said first responders called the hospital to see if anyone had come in with crash injuries and police checked the surrounding area—but both came up empty. So, firefighters fanned out on the expansive hillside and did a line search, using thermal imagining cameras.
On Thursday, Lt. Gabriel Rivera, who led the search, gave News 12 a closer look at the camera and explained how it works. “It’s giving you basically a contrast of temperature between the environment and what you’re actually focusing on,” Rivera said. “So, extreme temperatures to human temperatures. It also gives a visual with an outline of actually what the object is that you’re looking at.”
Ten minutes into the search Sunday, the camera picked up a significant heat spot. “This victim was 700 feet from the wrecked car, and when the captain saw him, he was probably 100 feet away, so the captain couldn’t really tell that it was a person. But he could tell that the heat signature was 95 degrees in a 33-degree environment,” Meehan stated.
“Obviously, it’s something there. It could’ve been an animal or anything,” Rivera added. “Crews walked up, and the camera basically was our eyes in the dark.”
When firefighters found the victim, he had trauma injuries from the crash as well as symptoms of hypothermia, according to Meehan.
“So, a while longer would not have been a favorable outcome,” Meehan said. “This is a very expansive area. It’s 30-something acres, down a hill, into some thick brush, along a highway in an airport approach zone. Without their tenacity, we would’ve never found him.”
Every Danbury engine is equipped with a thermal imaging camera.
“The cameras were originally designed to search burning buildings to differentiate between a stuffed animal and a 2-year-old child, and the firefighters use that successfully all the time and to locate hidden fires in walls and spaces that they can’t necessarily see,” Meehan told News 12.