By Elizabeth Mohr
The St. Paul Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL, Minn. — After a woman was killed when a St. Paul fire department ambulance backed up and hit her in an alley last summer, Jovan Palmieri was stunned and frustrated.
The 10-year veteran of the department had been working for months on designing a system to prevent such an incident.
“I’d been researching accidents and was shocked to hear that the newest one happened in my own back yard,” Palmieri said. “It was kind of a helpless feeling, knowing there is something out there that could stop these things from happening.”
Palmieri, 33, is a firefighter, driver and paramedic who has a patent pending for his invention, the Back Safe System. He’s at the Minnesota Inventor’s Congress in Redwood Falls today, debuting the prototype.
A January 2009 internal memo from the fire department reminding staff of procedures to back up vehicles safely sparked Palmieri’s idea.
“The memo came out, I think, January 22, and that same day I was backing a truck and thought, ‘This is really dangerous. I can’t even see those guys,’ ” Palmieri said. “I started working on it right away.”
He now has the support of St. Paul Fire Chief Timothy Butler and hopes to make connections at the convention to help him through the next phase of production.
“If it operates as it’s designed, it will undoubtedly save lives,” Butler said. “I told Jovan I would be happy to be a test site or host a test of that equipment. And if it works the way he’s explaining it would, I see no reason why St. Paul would not want to install this system on their equipment.”
Butler noted that he is not endorsing the system and is not in business with Palmieri. He has yet to see the system in action but said it seems better and more intuitive than similar products he’s seen on the market.
Palmieri, an Elk River resident, worked with engineering students at Minnesota State Mankato to build the prototype. He’s a first-time inventor, he said, with no training in electrical engineering.
The system involves a series of LED lights in the cab of the vehicle, controlled by a spotter — another emergency worker — holding a lighted wand that doubles as a walkie-talkie and wireless remote.
The spotter uses the wand to relay to the driver when it’s safe to reverse and can show the driver which way to turn, through a system of blinking lights.
“Nationwide, I looked up standard operating procedures (for backing), and it’s all hand signals. But they’re hard to see in the mirror, and they’re all different. ... They’re inconsistent,” Palmieri said. “With the technology available today, there’s no reason we can’t have solid audiovisual communication that’s wireless. Hand signals are just antiquated.”
In researching for and creating the system, Palmieri found one other company had tried something similar, though it was “very basic,” he said.
His version, he said, makes the spotter more visible and has built-in safety elements, such as a full-handle lever that operates when depressed. If the spotter drops the wand or falls (say, on an icy road), the system goes into “stop” mode.
The St. Paul fire department, along with most other fire departments nationally, requires spotters to aid drivers backing up large vehicles, Butler said.
St. Paul has an exemption for emergencies, which is what happened when Margaret Kuehn, 79, was fatally struck by a St. Paul fire department ambulance, Butler said.
Kuehn had been standing in the alley behind her home in the 1600 block of James Avenue on June 20 when an ambulance responded to a car accident. A driver had crashed through a privacy fence in the Walgreens parking lot, crossed over a retaining wall and landed in the adjacent alley.
The ambulance backed up and hit Kuehn, who possibly had gone into the alley to see what was going on. The ambulance driver, Thomas Murakami, was not charged with a crime.
An attorney for Kuehn’s family, Patrick O’Neill, said in a written claim to the city July 23 that Murakami “willfully disregarded St. Paul fire department written standard operating procedure by driving in reverse without hand guidance by a crew member or a police officer.”
Kuehn’s family received $175,000 in a settlement with the city.
Butler said he is considering always requiring spotters.
“There are certainly steps we will be able to take in the future because of the lessons we learned in her case,” Butler said.
“I don’t want to dredge up negative things, but certainly that (incident) was a spur for some good things, that out of tragedy a good idea can happen. Out of tragedy, our policies can change.”
Copyright 2010 St. Paul Pioneer Press