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2009 Invention Awards: Rescue Reel
As the 9/11 inferno unfolded on television, one question kept dogging Kevin Stone: Why weren’t the people trapped in the World Trade Center able to make their way to safety?
“I said to myself, This is crazy,” recalls Stone, an orthopedic surgeon and seasoned inventor in San Francisco. “There should be a better way to exit a skyscraper when something like this happens.”
Stone found all the existing systems for rescuing people from high places to be flawed or impractical, so he designed a device based on a fishing reel, a simple harness that would lower people steadily from skyscraper heights on a secure length of cord.
The Rescue Reel affords people an easy way to engineer their own escape: All users have to do is open a file-drawer-size container and hook a Kevlar cord to a secure object or connection point (such as between a door and its frame).
Then they step directly into the one-size-fits-all harness and rappel through an open window up to 100 stories from the ground. No special training is needed, and the entire sequence could take less than a minute.
Photo by Popular Science.
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Angela Shupe on May 25th, 2009 11:22 am
He’s right, I’m also surprised that there wasn’t already something like this in case of an emergency. His creation is a smart one, and something that all people who work or live in one of those many tall buildings should consider owning.
Jaclyn on May 26th, 2009 6:17 am
That is such an awesome idea it’s hard to explain how cool that is! Think about all the people that could have been saved over the year’s in disasters like this had this invention been around. I am totally surprised that resuce teams have failed to think about this so far, i mean…that’s what they do is resuce people from all different situation’s and they always are having meetings on new way’s of bettering the rescue system, so i just can’t believe that no one thought of this until now.
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