Revolutionizing Emergency Evacuation with SafeEVAC’s AI Technology

Bruce Graham (00:00)
You have to make a decision whether you’re leaving a room or turning right or turning left and how to get out and you don’t have the police there to help you yet and even if they’re in the building they’re not in your room, so the philosophy was what can we do to Take people’s out of harm’s way get them out of the building

or take them somewhere in the building that’s fortified or a muster area, a safe room type of situation, so they can take care of themselves before authorities get there.

and that’s really the first premise of the whole intelligent evacuation and it is intelligent you know if there’s a shooter in one room there’s an evacuation plan if there’s a chemical spill in another room that’s a completely different evacuation plan if the threat moves the evacuation plans move along with

Dylan Silver (02:16)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a Florida based CEO leading SafeEVAC, the only patented intelligent evacuation system that uses smart exit science, AI and building integrated tech to safely guide people in emergencies. He’s also has a construction development background. Please welcome Bruce Graham. Bruce, welcome to the show.

Bruce Graham (02:42)
Hi, how are you? Thank you. Thanks for having me today. Pretty excited to be here.

Dylan Silver (02:46)
It’s great to have you on here, Bruce. always say, I know the company is based in Indiana, but any Florida people, know that it’s great in Florida. I’ve been through Florida so many times, and specifically the Fort Lauderdale area. I tell everybody I’ve been to Fort Lauderdale five times and it never ceases to amaze me how nice it is. I know you’re not in Florida right now, but where are you based out of in the Florida area?

Bruce Graham (03:07)
We’re over by Fort Myers on an island called Pine Island Which is off a Cape Coral, but it’s in the Fort Myers area General Fort Myers area by Sanibel and Captiva and those outer islands

Dylan Silver (03:18)
Is that, forgive me for my ignorance here, is that south, is that west, is that east, is that central?

Bruce Graham (03:24)
Well no, that’s on the water, it’s on the west coast. If you’re familiar with Naples, we’re about 35 or 40 miles north of Naples.

Dylan Silver (03:31)
⁓ This is how I become jealous Bruce I say I got to move out there to Florida but ⁓ I always like to start off at the top by asking folks you know how they they got into the niche or the avatar the vertical that they’re in and certainly with an intelligent AI smart evacuation it’s really something that I’m really never heard of before and I think is so interesting because so needed how did you get involved in this space?

Bruce Graham (03:37)
Texas is free.

Well, I am not one of the founders. There was two founders from Indiana and ⁓ they got together after the Parkland shooting and started to talk about, you know, what could they do from a technology perspective to help kids get out of harm’s way in schools? So that was the first passion is to try to, try to protect kids in schools. And actually, you know, the, what they’ve developed or we’ve developed over time is applicable in any building that has multiple exits.

you know, if there’s a bad character, try to get people out of harm’s way, et cetera. But they took a lot of time noodling on how to do this. And most of the…

arguments and I’ll use the term arguments because things can get pretty heated about safety in schools always falls back to the gun issue. Should teachers have guns? Should there be police there? You know, are guns good? Are guns bad? And it’s really, it’s really not about guns and we’re pretty agnostic to any school system and what their policy is there.

⁓ are our philosophy is you know in the first four minutes most of shootings or chemical spills or any kind of hazard has either come to a close or as close to a close the famous ones like uvalde and parkland themselves ⁓ you know may last a little bit longer

in some cases very much longer because the police don’t know how to respond but they all talk about the police being first responders and we love the police in fact we were just in Washington DC for police week a number of weeks ago so we’re great we’re great advocates and supporters there but in many many cases most cases the first 20 or 30 seconds

You have to make a decision whether you’re leaving a room or turning right or turning left and how to get out and you don’t have the police there to help you yet and even if they’re in the building they’re not in your room, so the philosophy was what can we do to Take people’s out of harm’s way get them out of the building

or take them somewhere in the building that’s fortified or a muster area, a safe room type of situation, so they can take care of themselves before authorities get there.

and that’s really the first premise of the whole intelligent evacuation and it is intelligent you know if there’s a shooter in one room there’s an evacuation plan if there’s a chemical spill in another room that’s a completely different evacuation plan if the threat moves the evacuation plans move along with

it and all this is controlled by a command center just run operation center it’s a command center when it’s in emergency mode but other than that it’s just an operation center and you know then we

can guide through the system police to the threat directly and or get people’s out of harm’s way so the the smart intelligent exit ⁓ exit signs that you mentioned in the beginning if ⁓ if I can I’d like to go on and explain how those work okay well we’ve taken the the dumb exit sign which is usually just lit sometimes not lit that’s above every door that we all get used to and we’re so used to it that a lot of times we don’t even know where it is

and we made that a smart sign now. So we replace that sign with one of our own signs. It can turn ⁓ red, green, yellow, and blue, and I’ll explain those colors in a second. It has independent use of the arrows. So in some emergencies, you might go turn right, and some emergencies, you might turn left.

It has gunshot detection in it, other speakers and microphones and sensors to pick up keywords. So if you have a code word in a classroom or you have a floor captain that’s in an office building or in a retail center, they can use a code word and then talk right to the operation center and tell them what the threat is.

And then then it directs people by verbal commands. So it’ll tell you danger, you know Stay in place if you’re supposed to stay in place Follow the green to safety tells you how to get out of the building follow the green to the blue area tells you how to get to the mustard area So it tells you what to do It shows you what to do and one of the most intriguing parts is it has a Strobe on it that goes that has different patterns for the four different commands and the reason we added the strobe and flashing not only does it draw your attention

to it but in many cases a building might have somebody that’s you know hard of hearing or can’t hear or is blind or very hard of sight or colorblind it’s amazing about 10 % of the population is colorblind didn’t know before so we have the third way to to instruct occupants in a building how to get to safety

Dylan Silver (08:51)
Yeah.

Bruce Graham (08:59)
So that’s how the signs themselves work, but what’s beautiful in what we put together is the red of course is a danger area. The green is follow with the safety. The blue is the safe area either outside the building or in a fortified room. And the yellow itself is on the back side of the green and it tells the occupants caution don’t go that way just like a streetlight. You know when it turns yellow, it’s caution.

But it also tells authorities when they go around the outside of the building, they’ll be able to see that there’s yellow above all the exits on the outside of the building, red in the exit that’s closest to the threat. And then they can go into the yellow doors and follow the yellow right to the threat.

that saves them an enormous amount of time by the use of our cameras our connection integration to 911 they can now see into our cameras and see what’s going on they know which rooms have been vacated are safe their worry about getting home at the end of the day is reduced they don’t they’re pretty assured that they will not be ambushed because we’re in total communication with them and the 911 center has every feed that we have and it can be used again it doesn’t have to it’s built

for you know an active shooter situation but it can be used if there’s a fire you know if they’re

somebody pulls a fire alarm because they want to draw the occupants out into the hallway so they could shoot them there. We actually turn on the whole system at that pole, can identify whether there really is a fire or not a fire and then turn it off and direct people to stay in place. So it, there’s an enormous amount of information that’s actionable. You know, everybody has information that they think they know, but in emergency situations, your focus kind of just, it goes down. You can only see right

front of you you can’t really remember what you did you know just 30 seconds ago and try to evacuate a building so at the end of an event since we’ve recorded the entire event by camera and by microphone it’s it’ll be very very important to ⁓ investigations and there’s two types of investigation there’s obviously the legal investigation there’s probably going to be insurance and sue you know people suing each other claims it’s going to be used for that

but it also makes us much better at how we reacted to that particular event. Right? So it gives us knowledge. Yeah, go ahead.

Dylan Silver (11:49)
I want I want to ask you

about the existing systems. mean, and just I guess backing up a little bit here, of course, every time and there was just I’m from 27 miles outside of Manhattan, I believe it might be a little bit more than that in northern New Jersey. And there was just an incident, I believe, in Manhattan. Very sad, right. And so many of these things and each time there might be a clamor but

Bruce Graham (12:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dylan Silver (12:12)
We’ve always heard and you mentioned there’s so many things with maybe guns or what do we do with metal detectors or who does what to fortify the rooms. But I have not heard anybody talking about really an alternative that could be used as a deterrent or as a way to kind of facilitate a stronghold, a stronger position, which is what this is. It’s fortifying the building, right?

Does this tie into the existing system? So if there’s fire doors that can be kind of locked, or if there’s certain doors or types of things in the existing structure that could kind of tie into the system here, can those be tied in? Or because those may be an older type of system or an older technology, it wouldn’t be able to tie in with the…

Bruce Graham (12:37)
Yeah.

No,

it’s…

We’re we’re pretty much I mean what we do behind the curtain is our intellectual property right the way our signs communicate to each other etc But other than that we are agnostic to anything that’s existing so we will tie into you know, if you if you have a building or a school again, but Any type of building and you’ve just put 500 000 or a million dollars into a security system with cameras and everything We’ll just take those feeds and augment what we do because that just makes everybody a little bit smarter

on how we react. we’ll integrate with security cameras, we’ll integrate with metal detectors, we’ll integrate with chemical sensors, which is usually, we pretty much have to integrate with other people’s systems for that because the exit door itself and the exit strategy is not normally right over a lab.

table or something like that right and some some chemicals spills fall to the ground and some are airborne and actually go up to the ceiling but we’re agnostic we will we will connect with everything including building automation systems that can lock doors or open doors I mean if you can imagine what we call intelligent isolation if we know where the bad guy is

and we can lock off all the doors and still save one or two exits for anybody that might bolt out of a room, they can still get out.

But the rest of the building or wings or stairwells to other floors are all locked off. So then we can isolate this bad guy or the chemical spill or the medical emergency into one particular area. Then we could have the police, you know, come up and get ready behind a set of doors, right? That we would open on their command. And we can even use our microphones and our speakers, mostly the speakers to, but the microphones to identify the

the volume and you know the chaos in the room and if it’s kind of a quiet area after he started his melee we can actually make it sound like police dogs and police are coming in from the south but really they’re going to come in from the north right

Flashlights at them, know, we there’s other technologies that I’ve liked blasters and we can do that as well. So The system the system is a powerful powerful tool the authority to use the system still lays within the police So we’re as soon as they arrive or as soon as we start communicating with them They tell us where they want to set up they tell us where you know, which doors will lock or which ones will unlock and You know that gives them complete command

control and again it’s about actionable data and communication you know because somebody is trapped in a room might try to on his cell phone to call 9-1-1 but bad guys now can buy a cell jammer and a Wi-Fi jammer and a GPS jammer for you know somewhere in the neighborhood of you know three hundred dollars or so

So they could come in and turn off all those communications. But because we’re hardwired on a separate server on site, it would be very hard, and we think impossible, but very hard for anybody to thwart our system.

Dylan Silver (16:37)
I mean, it seems like a no-brainer. I’m listening to all of this and I say, anybody who might have opposition as far as some of the other methods involved, which saying I don’t, maybe it’s politicized, this seems like a no-brainer. Right, I mean, I grew up and so many people grew up with fire drills, right, and maybe at one point in time that seemed a little bit, but of course we see so much with, unfortunately, violence in schools, violence in public, violence in all different public areas and…

Unfortunately, I grew up in 27 miles outside of New York City and then I was in Boston during the Boston Marathon bombing. so it’s impacted so many people’s lives, including mine. And then the school thing is just…

you know, beyond words, beyond words. I’m curious to get your feedback on the reception from the schools, because in my mind it’s just such a no-brainer.

Bruce Graham (17:26)
Well, we have showed it to no one that has said, I don’t like the system, I don’t want the system. We’ve shown it to people at the highest level in the federal Department of Education. We’ve shown it to school districts. We’ve shown it to security professionals. It’s kind of interesting. We went to…

uh… one of the we have actually we have great advisors and uh… consultants on our team too one of them is a past president of an organization called ASIS it’s an international organization it’s the largest security focused one and under his advice he said you should go and do their trade show so we went to do their trade show about five hundred vendors i think i believe something like seventeen to nineteen thousand people attended it’s the largest in the security world and when you sign up for it you have

to

pick all these categories are we manned security are we cameras are we you know whatever the thing is there’s like 50 categories not one of those categories mentioned evacuation so when we got there we were in the new

new pavilion because it was the first time that we had shown and we had by far the most traffic, the most interest and we’re going back there this year and doing some special things for them but the point is this evacuation category where people can take care of themselves in those first couple seconds just has not been addressed before and what’s really important about ours

Because I think in time, people will see that it’s a very viable business, right? And the market is endless.

But the use of the exit sign itself is incredibly important because you…

You cannot, you cause confusion if somebody gets to a door or gets to an area and it says exit in the regular old dump sign, but then something next to it is telling you something else that causes people to pause. That’s where people pile up on top of each other when they’re evacuating the building. Anytime you ask the occupant that’s leaving the building in an emergency situation to stop and think you cause an obstacle for everybody else. And even

themselves it takes time am i making the right decision so the use of the exit light itself being the single point of communication in those situations plus we have supplemental signs where there’s not exit signs but the exit signs are there they’re required to be there by building code and fire code and so the ability to use those is very very important one of our you know we’re based in ⁓ indiana so one of our biggest projects is in indiana and they were built in suspenders they wanted to make

And so they took their procurement process down two paths. One of them was to go directly to the Department of Homeland Security in Indiana and ask them about our system. And they came back and said, yeah, there’s no special codes for the system. All it does is augment and make better our existing system. So we got the stamp of approval there. And then they also, you know, in a normal procurement process, they’re required to go get three bids, write a scope, do a certain amount of time.

And they they researched us this discovered what we already knew that there is no competition. There’s nobody that does anything like this. Even if you staple together 10 other systems, it can’t do this. So we were allowed to be a single source procurement customer so they can just come to us and buy. don’t they didn’t have to go through any other kind of process. So our speed to market with those two things now is far greater than it used to be because school districts and public buildings and government buildings

Dylan Silver (20:33)
Right.

Bruce Graham (20:52)
have a need to be competitive to protect the interests financially of their constituents. But in this case now we have the blessing that we can be single sourced and go from there. So it’s really good.

Dylan Silver (21:06)
It’s such a it’s such a need and I think also huge opportunity right because What’s more important to people than their safety their safety of their? Loved ones friends and family. I mean, it’s the most important and it becomes more and more important with every unfortunate incident that happens and so I think more people are aware of it they’re thinking about it they’ve people are moving away from that that wouldn’t happen here mentality and what can we do to kind of

you know, up our areas of work are where we go to school and, you know, do something that everyone’s going to get behind, right? And this is just seems like such a no brainer, I think to me and everyone listening, but we are coming up on on time here, Bruce, where can folks go if maybe they’d like to learn more about the system or see how they could maybe reach out to you or get in contact with anyone over at safe e-back?

Bruce Graham (21:47)
Okay.

Sure, sure. thank you for this time. If you had an hour show, I could probably fill an hour because it’s really pretty interesting and we’re pretty passionate about it. But in closing, obviously we have a website, ⁓ safeevac.com and it’s S-A-F-E-E-V-A-C. So there’s two E’s in the middle of it, like it’s two words crammed together.

⁓ so you can find us there you can find us on linkedin in the same way there’s a facebook page etc i’m not big on the social media but i know it exists but what what may even be better if one of your listeners wants to get more information as we have we’re putting together a bunch of resources partners on a national basis and one of them is a company called fast signs

and they have a number of locations probably in your listeners communities. what’s really nice if you want to go through the fast signs is we’re just rolling this out so you might have to talk to a manager. I don’t know if the rank and file will know exactly what this is. But everybody else will have access to being able to get the safe evac information we have. There’s videos, there’s coaching on how to address if it’s a hospital or a school or a municipal

entity or even if it’s your place of work or worship churches are a big target as well. You know so you can get information through them and they’re right in your community right there and you’re not calling some people in Indiana or Florida these people are right in your towns they can come out and look at your building help you get the information and garner the information we need to create a plan and so it’s a really great resource if you want to just you know contact your local fast science company.

Dylan Silver (23:28)
Bruce, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Bruce Graham (23:32)
Well, thank you.