New York City Adopts RFID Tags to Track First Responders

With the tragic events of September 11, 2001 in mind, the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) has achieved great success implementing a new technology using radio identification to coordinate its 14,000 firefighters and emergency responders. "The events of 9-11-2001 revealed that FDNY did not have a reliable method to account for all members responding to an incident,” said FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief Edward Baggott in a statement. In response, David DeRieux of the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Space Systems—the Navy’s corporate laboratory—and Michael Manning of Manning RF, partnered with FDNY to invent a system to track firefighters who may be in danger through an active radio frequency identifier (RFID) tag carried by each firefighter.