A Charleston native is marketing inflatable evacuation slides, resembling those on passenger airplanes, to school systems concerned about active shooters and other emergencies.
Blair White began flying planes at age 12 and helicopters at 15, for a time becoming the nation's youngest licensed helicopter pilot in 1998, when he was 17. He said his aircraft background led him to conceive the idea shortly after the 2012 shooting at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 people were killed. An FBI-commissioned study of "active shooter incidents" from 2000 to 2013 found 27 occurred in pre-K-12 schools across the U.S.
White said he received a patent - designed alongside his patent attorney, who is also an engineer - three months ago on his Slide To Safety. His company's website, still under production, has videos including "Jump Or Slide - You Decide," in which footage of first responders roughly pulling a Columbine High School shooting victim out of an upper story window is contrasted with a green screen-background video of the Slide To Safety deploying from a building. The website also has a press release citing the Oct. 1 mass shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College in stressing the need for the product.
Slide To Safety also has its own children's mascot, Simon the Safety Seal, and a "Call To Action" form to send letters to state and federal lawmakers, school superintendents and the president.
"We need your help in garnering support for current legislation to be passed on the federal and state levels mandating a Slide to Safety rapid evacuation slide be in every classroom," the website states.
White said about 20 slides, intended to show off the product to school systems, are being constructed in Florida, where he's been working on a promotion video this week.
"My patent is basically the exact same system that's on the aircraft, except I have a patent that allows it to be put on buildings," he said.
White said the reusable slides can last more than 20 years, and could be installed under windows in a flower-box type setup: Someone would pull a special lever during an emergency, causing compressed air to enter the slide and inflating it in a few seconds.
He said the slides could be attached to rooms up to four stories high, and empty a classroom of 22 students and a teacher in about a minute. He said the actual sliding surface is about 48 inches wide with tubes on each side, and the version attached to second-story classrooms will be about 20-feet long, allowing for a 1-second trip down for each person.
To eliminate the delay of children having to get up to the window's height to get on the slide, White said schools could also replace some upper story windows with external doors that would connect to the slides, dropping the evacuation time to about 45 seconds. He said Slide To Safety prevents the door or the window connected to the chute from opening until the slide is fully deployed.
Rudy Raynes, an assistant state fire marshal, said it'd be unlikely for the West Virginia Office of the State Fire Marshal to approve such a product for school buildings. He said inflatable evacuation chutes aren't addressed in codes of the National Fire Protection Association or the International Building Code, and said such devices would likely have to be endorsed nationally before West Virginia authorities would sign off on them.
"You'd have to convince a lot of people that this would work," Raynes said.
White said building codes will have to be adjusted to accommodate the devices, and hopes to push around the start of next year for regulation changes.
In fire situations, Raynes said school buildings are designed and maintained so occupants have time to go through hallways and reach designated fire exit stairwells - classroom doors, for instance, are meant to keep fires out, or contain them inside, for at least 20 minutes. He expressed concerns about escapees trying to crawl through windows to get on slides.
"Who's going to test this, who's going to maintain this, who's going to know if it's going to work?" Raynes asked.
As for active shooters, experts on the subject have said there's only been one case - in 2005 at a high school on Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation - in which a shooter actually breached a school classroom that was locked in compliance with the traditional lockdown procedure, in which students and teachers lock and stay behind their classroom doors. Even then, the attacker got in by shooting out an interior glass window. At Sandy Hook, the attacker shot out glass to get around the locked front doors and enter the school.
Kanawha County Schools Security Director Keith Vititoe, who said the county has 27 schools with second-story classrooms, said he has researched the inflatable evacuation slide concept, which he said isn't new.
"I like the idea because it's the first thing that came to my mind when visiting some of these schools," said Vititoe, who started his position in April.
This semester, he brought to Kanawha schools ALICE training, one of several national programs that train students and school employees how to protect themselves from active shooters before police arrive. In a departure from the traditional school lockdown procedure, ALICE prioritizes evacuation - something the slides could aid. But Vititoe said the cost of installing evacuation slides for each upper-level classroom would likely be prohibitive.
"Ladders are cheap, but they're also dangerous to small kids, and we can't hand carry each one of these kids down the ladder," he said.
White said it's currently difficult to estimate what his product will cost, but believes he can get the price down to about $20,000, a tenth the cost of the versions installed on aircraft. He said he's working to get federal grant money from the departments of Education, Justice and Homeland Security to subsidize the actual cost to states and school systems to about $4,000 per slide.
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazette.com, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.