Los Gatos Weekly-Times Photograph by George Sakkestad DART commander Pete Henrichsen shows off some of the surplus equipment and supplies donated by Lockheed-Martin. Henrichsen delivers the (surplus) goods By Jeff Kearns There will be a few items under the tree this year for the Los Gatos Disaster Aid Response Team. But although the gifts are from Lockheed-Martin instead of Santa Claus, that's close enough. DART took possession of leftover equipment and supplies from Lockheed-Martin last week, including HAZMAT bunny suits, breathing tanks, body harnesses and portable floodlights. According to DART commander Pete Henrichsen, the whole package would have cost more than $12,000 off the shelf. Henrichsen, who engineered the donation himself, took the top spot at the all-volunteer organization Nov. 23, after former commander Joe Pirzynski took his new job as a Town Council member. As supervisor of facilities engineering at Lockheed-Martin in Sunnyvale, Henrichsen saw most of the equipment sitting around unused. The goods belonged to the company's environmental cleanup team, which did dirty work like asbestos cleanups, lead removal and other environmental remediation at the huge aerospace complex until it was disbanded in the recent downsizings of the last five years. Now, DART gets the equipment, and Lockheed-Martin gets a tax write-off. Henrichsen got permission to pass the surplus along to a local community organization, which happened to be his own. He didn't get everything he asked for, but he's still trying for a few more items. "I only grabbed things I thought would be applicable to DART's work," Henrichsen says. "It's anything I thought I could use in a standard rescue situation. It was just collecting dust on the shelf." Henrichsen, 46, joined DART four years ago, after reading an article about the organization in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. Because he was formally trained in urban search and rescue, specifically for difficult rescues in collapsed structures and confined spaces, Henrichsen asked Pirzynski to start an urban program, and, along with a $1,000 donation from Home Depot, the Urban Rescue Team was born. A partial inventory of the Lockheed-Martin donation includes: 100 Tyvek bunny suits, four air tanks and masks, a set of portable floodlights, four body harnesses, 300 feet of rescue rope, three heavy-duty 200-foot extension cords, five shovels, a submersible pump, six hard hats, 50 pairs of safety goggles and four cases of duct tape. "You can always use duct tape," Henrichsen says. The police department may also get some use out of the equipment. The department could ask DART to bring in floodlights when collecting evidence at a crime scene at night, Henrichsen said, or DART members could use the HAZMAT suits to check out a contaminated scene before sending in officers. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, December 23, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.