USSC’s Continued Growth and Focus on Firefighter Safety

BY CHRIS Mc LOONE

I’ve been traveling to Chester County, Pennsylvania, for most of my life. My grandfather, a retired Philadelphia (PA) Fire Department firefighter, moved his family there in the early 1970s. After retiring from the fire department, he worked for National Foam, in Exton, Pennsylvania, a short 10- to 15-minute drive from his new home.

When I was a kid, my grandfather would bring me there to take a look at fire apparatus that were at the facility. Back then, most of the Chester County I knew was still farmland. More than 40 years later, the area has seen the type of growth many communities located near major cities experience. As families moved west of the city but still within commuting distance, strip malls, shopping malls, myriad supermarkets, restaurants, housing developments, and highways began to appear. The National Foam facility predated much of this growth.

It had been close to 30 years since I was in that facility when I revisited in 2016 to tour the offices and manufacturing floor of the USSC Group, known to the fire service primarily for its Valor First Responder Seating. And, I made the trip back out in November 2018 to get a tour of the company’s new headquarters located just across the street. The company is growing both in square footage and product lines through acquisitions, which is a benefit to firefighters and the county it calls home. For the fire service, Valor First Responder Seating is a hub for a variety of other safety products USSC Group now produces.

USSC GROUP

USSC Group has been in business since the 1980s, rapidly growing from a small shop in a garage. The company started out making seats for trains and locomotives and moved into seats for buses in public transportation. According to Joe Mirabile, president and CEO of USSC Group, the company now enjoys a 60 percent market share of all public transit buses around the country. In the early 2000s, USSC Group began making seats for the military, and Mirabile says it manufactures the number one blast seat for the military. It is from its military DNA, says Mirabile, that the company began to make seats for the first responder market. “In about 2009/2010, we began to make seats for first responder, fire truck, and ambulance vehicles, and we also began to make fire suppression systems for vehicles,” says Mirabile. “We transitioned in 2009/2010 to a safety and survivability company where we were making a wide range of safety products outside of seating.”