One of those crashes involved the Worcester fire truck. Deputy Chief John F. Sullivan said Engine 2 was struck while performing a vital duty: acting as a buffer 400 feet behind another fire truck that was responding to a crash. 

"It performed exactly the way it was supposed to perform," Deputy Chief Sullivan said of the safety system, which is recommended by national first responder safety guidelines.

First responders are killed every year while tending to highway crashes, Deputy Chief Sullivan said. In this case, the driver of the buffer fire truck - the sole occupant of the vehicle - is expected to be OK after being taken to the hospital for back and neck pain.

Deputy Chief Sullivan said state police are investigating what led to the crash.

That means the firefighters can enter a smoke-filled room and scan it for sources of heat — coming from a person or a flame — and still have their hands free to handle equipment or make a rescue.

Neither the self-contained breathing apparatus nor the thermal imaging camera is new; the HFD has been using both for years. But the camera built into the mask has been on the market only since April. Albertson bought 15 of them last fall, enough for about half of the city’s firefighters. If they work out like he thinks they will, he plans to buy more for the rest of the department.

Firefighters have already used the combination mask/camera at one house fire.

“They knew no one was in the house,” Albertson says. “But when they walked in and looked around the room, they could see exactly where the fire was and put the fire out.”

Seeing a fire isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

“It will get so black and smoky you can literally put your hand in front of your face and you can’t see it,” the chief says.

A high-powered flashlight will light up an area about two to three feet in front of the firefighter, he says, but the thermal imaging camera gives the firefighter a view of heat sources in the entire room.

A stand-alone thermal imaging camera is large and occupies the firefighter’s hands. The new Scott Sight camera fits inside the breathing mask without obstructing the firefighter’s natural view. The dual-purpose equipment replaces air packs that were more than a decade old and becoming obsolete.

Q: What’s it like working up here in the winter?

A: If you can imagine trying to operate and do anything we do on an ice rink or in snowy conditions. So everything changes. Everything is more challenging. Everything is more delayed. It’s definitely unique in a fire department to operate in, but we’ve been operating in these conditions for 120-plus.

Q: What’s the hardest part?

A: Some of the biggest challenges that we come across are getting to an incident, road conditions, steep driveways covered in ice and snow and narrow shoulders on the highway.

Q: When happens when you respond to a call and find the road isn’t properly plowed?

A: We will call in for a plow to come up to our area. We have loaders in our fire station that we can use as well.

Q: And when that doesn’t work?

We carry snowshoes on our vehicles so we put a set of snowshoes on and grab our over-the-hill medical bag and hike into incidents.

Q: We’re expecting as much as six feet of snow by the end of the week. How do you find all the fire hydrants?

A: We’re going to find hydrants that are pretty well buried. Our department is very diligent about clearing out hydrants with loaders and having off-duty firefighters go out with shovels and really make sure that they’re accessible.