Every day, hundreds of thousands of emergency responders and workers do critical life-saving work on roads and highways across the country. Our Fleet Focus series highlights just some of the day-to-day experiences of these workers and what they see and experience while working in the field. This Fleet Focus features Virgil White from South Charleston Fire Department in South Charleston, West Virginia.

About Belmont Fire

My name’s Anthony Segars, I’m the fire chief at Belmont Fire Department in Greenville, South Carolina. We’re a fairly small fire district, we really only cover 9 square miles. But in that nine square miles, we cover federal interstate I-85, a lot of subdivided highways, a lot of rural roads. 

We see everything from small, very minor accidents that you can move from the roadway to overturned vehicles. We’re on the interstate five to ten times a week.

Tragedy Strikes

In 2005, one of our trucks was on the highway pulling out in route to an emerging call, and an 18 wheeler struck us in the side, putting three of our people in the hospital, two in ICU for several weeks. All were able to recover. 

Going through that trauma of seeing our people hurt, and no way really to help them in that situation was something that I never want to go through again. 

Belmont Fire Installs Safety Cloud®

Moving to HAAS and to some of the features it offers. The R2R, giving us that tool that we know another engine’s coming into that intersection with us, or even one of my own engines coming together. It’s far too often that we see fire engines crash, and a lot of times it’s in major cities, but it can happen in South Carolina, in rural South Carolina just as easily as it can happen in New York City. 

And the other features that you offer, I didn’t even realize so many of the options or features that you have in your dashboard. Monitoring speed for the people because not only do I want the people that we’re passing on the highway to follow the general rules and follow the safe guidelines of driving, I want my people who are driving my apparatus to be just as involved. 

It’s a two way street, we all have to get home, and to get back safely we all have to do our part. 

Book a Demo

Interested in Safety Cloud and digital alerting for your fleet? Click below to see for yourself how Safety Cloud can lower the chances of a collision by up to 90%. 

{{cta('4c72f469-b50b-4012-a309-4269e2e2f496')}}