My name is Mike Matros.
I'm the owner, inventor, and founder
of RedLine Gear Cleaning.
We are a mobile, on-site gear-cleaning company.
Today, we're going to be taking you through
the entire process of what is involved
in cleaning, inspecting,
and putting firefighting gear back in service.
One thing I wasn't really aware of
when I took the job as a firefighter
was the cancer problem that's plaguing the fire service.
Over the last 20 years,
66% of all firefighter line-of-duty deaths
have been related to cancer.
It's not if I get cancer, it's when I get cancer.
That particular risk and exposure
is something that we really want to try and mitigate.
If the environment is toxic
to the point where you have to wear your air pack,
that's an exposure.
Because if your lungs cannot handle the exposure,
your gear is absorbing all those exposures into it,
and that needs to be cleaned and washed.
So, the mobile extraction unit is actually a patented design
that allows the truck to come directly to the fire station
to be a mobile laundry facility
that specializes in cleaning firefighting gear.
It contains our water, our electric,
big commercial extractors, dryers,
equipment to clean helmets and air packs,
all specialized equipment needed
to clean firefighting gear specifically.
First step for us is to assess the firehouse,
and what that means could be going locker to locker,
looking at the gear,
determining how exposed the gear is,
determining what's in the guy's pockets,
determining what gear needs to be cleaned.
This helmet is what we like to call
in the fire service salty.
This helmet is gross.
It has seen a lot of smoke.
It has seen a lot of contaminants.
A lot of older guys tend to call their gear salty gear
as a badge of honor,
and they look at this gear
as something that shows experience
and shows they went to a very hot, very involved fire
and they got really dirty.
That is something that, at RedLine,
we're really trying to change that culture.
The badge of honor they're wearing
is causing cancer to these guys.
We're trying to tell them that clean is the new salty.
This is our ultrasonic machine.
So, as you can see, we're loading the helmets in,
and this is what has often been referred to
as our deep-fryer for helmets.
We use a degreaser.
We also use a sanitizer in here
that's going to clean, disinfect, and sanitize your helmet
to the point where it comes out,
we just have to wipe it down.
The helmet is probably the most important part
to a firefighter in terms of his gear.
RedLine's all firefighter-owned, firefighter-operated.
So some people like to say
we washed away all their experience.
I like to think we added a few years of life to them.
We take a lot of time washing and cleaning helmets.
Now, that's probably the most controversial thing
we do as a company,
because some people believe that helmet
should never be touched.
This gear is particularly very dirty.
Really needs a good deep cleaning
from both the helmet, hood, jacket, pants, liners.
All the gear really needs a good, heavy deep cleaning,
because this gear, it has seen a lot of exposure.
Once we've determined what gear needs to be cleaned,
that gear has to be inspected.
It has to be separated between the outer shells
and the inner liners, completely separated,
keeping those wash cycles completely different
so we don't have cross-contamination between the cleaning.
But while we're doing this, we're inspecting the gear.
We're looking for any rips,
we're looking for burn marks,
we're looking for holes in the gear.
We're looking for anything that can get a firefighter hurt.
Here we have taken the inner liner,
put it on our hydrostatic testing machine.
This is a process that would test a moisture barrier
of a firefighter suit to make sure that there's no leaks.
Or any problems with the moisture barrier,
to make sure that water isn't going to get
to a firefighter's skin and cause steam burns.
The next step would be to hand-clean the gear.
We use a product called Decon7
that we scrub gear to the point where we get
most of the contaminants off the gear initially.
This is an important part for us as part of the process
to get rid of any bulk contaminants
that would be on that gear, whether it be insulation
or anything else they might run into in the field.
A firefighter's gear needs to be cleaned
after every exposure.
As you can see, it gets pretty nasty.
After the inspection,
the inner liners are then separated out.
They're turned inside out, so this way we're washing
the part that is against your skin first.
Those would then go into our commercial extractor
and be washed through our five-cycle program.
We use cold water for washing gear.
This not only helps the cleaning process,
but at the same time it keeps the colors
and stuff in the fabric true.
We can fit six sets of firefighting gear
into these machines because they're so large.
That's 12 pieces of gear going into each extractor.
After both the inner shells and the outer shells
are cleaned through our extractor,
they then go into their respected dryer.
We're able to dry both the liners
and outer shells in one hour.
We lay out the boots that have to get hand-scrubbed,
and we are also fogging them,
spraying them with a disinfectant.
It's going to neutralize, it's going to kill,
it's going to disinfect anything
those boots might have come in contact with.
One of the key elements to a firefighter's gear
is the hood they wear underneath their helmet,
and it goes through. That protects their ears,
that protects their helmet.
People forget to even clean these.
Anything that's going to be exposed and touched to your skin
should be washed the same way as if you would
the liners that are next to your skin.
The water that comes off this extractor
is like a sludge, like a mud,
so anybody who believes the cancer problem
in the fire service isn't real,
I encourage you to see the wastewater
that comes off this gear.
It is nasty, it is black, it is like mud.
So at the end of every job,
it's important for us to show what the wastewater
and what the situation is like
in terms of what's coming off the gear.
This is the stuff that's coming off your gear.
This is stuff we just cleaned, just now,
that has loaded with soot, loaded with chemicals,
loaded with stuff that's causing cancer to these guys.
And we make it a point to show these filters
to all of our customers, to all the firefighters,
to know just how dirty their gear was
and how important cleaning their gear is.
Our filtration process is so in depth
that it allows us to take really dirty water, filter it,
run it through a number of filters,
run it through a full process
that makes that water completely clean, reusable,
prevents us from putting toxic products
back into the environment,
and makes it a sustainable solution
that we can keep using and be very environmental-safe
after we clean very toxic gear.
Today, the fire service is made up of a lot of chemicals.
In the form of combustion at a fire,
every single room now has plastics, has particleboard,
has different materials that are burning.
It's causing the fires to burn hotter,
to burn more violently,
and the smoke is thick, nasty, black smoke.
So while the fire service has been around for years,
the makeup and the exposures of the fire service
are very different nowadays.
Our final product is taking
all 10 pieces of gear that was cleaned,
putting it back together,
putting it in a gear bag, ready to go.
Boots are on bottom, pants, jacket,
hoods and gloves tucked in the side,
helmet on the top,
as one complete package, ready to go.
We can't control the dangers of the job,
but we can control the exposure rate
of what these guys are exposed to
from a cancer-causing substance
that's really killing this fire service.
I don't need to see soot and dust
all over a guy's helmet and gear
to know he knows how to do his job.
I want to see a guy who's clean, got his uniform in shape,
everything is properly ready to go,
he's able to perform his job to the best of his ability.
That's a salty firefighter.