Moving from strength to strength: Redline Gear Cleaning’s mission to reduce firefighter cancer risk
Iain Hoey
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Michael Matros, President and Founder of Redline Gear Cleaning spotlights the critical impact of fast turnarounds and keeping gear clean
Michael Matros had a vision- to make clean gear accessible.
After founding Redline Gear Cleaning in 2019, the company have only gone from strength to strength.
In this interview with International Fire and Safety Journal (IFSJ) Assistant Editor Isabelle Crow, Matros discusses the challenges he has fought to overcome and why his mission was always personal.
As Matros puts it: “I knew I had the opportunity to create a change”.
A significant focus of Redline’s is meeting the NFPA 1851 standard, why is maintaining and exceeding these standards essential to your work?
The NFPA 1851 standard is basically our Bible.
In our world, that’s the regulatory agent that decides how gear should be cleaned and handled.
Therefore, we take not just achieving but exceeding the standard incredibly seriously.
We make sure we go above and beyond on every level, even if we are cleaning the gear in a truck and on a mobile platform.
We never use this as an excuse, in fact, it’s a benefit to the business.
What are the biggest challenges you see fire departments and safety teams facing today when it comes to gear maintenance and decontamination and how does Redline address these issues?
Logistics and time are by far the biggest issue.
For a firefighter to send his gear out for a couple of weeks or even months in the worst case, is similar to you not having a computer.
They are completely handicapped as a firefighter and can’t perform their job.
This means people often refuse to send their gear out for cleaning because they don’t have another set or simply just the time.
Firefighter often opt to just reuse dirty gear instead.
The detrimental impact of wearing dirty gear cannot be undermined, this is because of the direct link to an increased risk of cancer for firefighters.
Therefore, being able to handle the logistics of same-day cleaning is essential.
We want to continue to be in a position where we bring the resources to the station, whether that be by educating firefighters on proper gear cleaning or by bringing the cleaning to them.
Our goal has always been to come in and clean everything on-site and have it turned around in three hours.
With conversations only growing surrounding the link between a career fighting fires and occupational cancer, why is playing a role in preventing particulates and contaminants such a personal mission for the company?
Alongside being the Founder and President of Redline, I am still a career firefighter, with 22-years’ experience as a firefighter paramedic.
For me, this business has always been personal.
I launched Redline because I had a nonprofit that focused on cancer prevention in the fire service, I was constantly pushing clean gear from that perspective.
Unfortunately, I have been to too many funerals of people who have passed away from occupational cancer- it is an issue that we just needed to do better on.
It was when my Chief was telling me that the gear that had just been sent off would be several weeks until it returned that I realized the severity of the situation.
What was I going to do without my gear? This was when I began to realize that the logistics of cleaning gear and the reality were two different worlds.
I began asking why we didn’t just have a company come and clean the gear in-house, to which I was told that this did not exist.
In that moment, I knew I had the opportunity to create a change, by putting the cleaning unit into a truck.
It never crossed my mind that I would be in the laundry business, but the need within the fire service was undeniable.
Redline Gear Cleaning was launched in 2019 and we are now opening our 15th location as the fastest growing ISP in the fire service.
The goal for us has always been to remain focused on customer service and offer our clients a simple and easy process.
We are growing so quickly that it can be hard to keep track, at the moment, we are basically putting a new truck on the road about every three months.
Redline is now the official ISP of FDIC, so we work to clean every piece of gear at the show.
It is a fantastic opportunity for us.
Last year, we had six trucks and this year we will have ten alongside 75 employees- our presence is only growing.
Redline provides rapid response cleaning and a Mobile Extraction Unit. What feedback have you received from departments about the impact of your ability to quickly turnaround clean gear?
Our impact has been critical to fire departments.
It has gotten to the point where a lot of departments have built us into their response cards, they are starting to look to us as much as they do their neighbors for mutual aid assignments.
We’ve even had customers tell us they will purchase anything we offer because it only builds upon their current experience; Redline is becoming their full PPE compliance department.
Rather than just a service, we offer a complete operational change to the department with renowned health and safety benefits.