Summit Safety, Inc.

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A History of Summit Safety

Summit Safety Inc., (SSI) is located in Devens, Massachusetts, and was founded in late December, 1999 by an ultrasound engineer and several other concerned Boston area residents in the wake of the devastating 1999 Worcester, MA warehouse fire earlier that month. Like everyone else, we held our breaths as the events of that night unfolded. It was so unthinkable. Even today, most people in Massachusetts can tell you where they were and what they were doing when the story broke.

Before it was over, six firefighters attempting to rescue two people they believed to be inside had lost their way and perished. We followed the news throughout that evening and into the following weeks when all six firefighters were finally accounted for. We watched with gratitude as some 30,000 people from around the world slipped quietly into our small state to pay their respects and help us make sense of what had just happened.

The events of that evening and the weeks that followed raised two pivotal questions for us. Who are these firefighters, these people so willing to run the wrong direction in a crisis to look after total strangers? And how could we use what we already knew to help level the playing field?

SSI was started for the express purpose of developing a system for firefighters to use in tracking their way in and out of a fire scene and to pinpoint one another inside when necessary. The technology is based on ultrasound, and operates like a type of sonar.