Kenai mechanics garnered the Innovation Safety Award by the Alaska Safety Council last week for designing safer police vehicles.
Neither the city shop foreman Randy Parrish or mechanic Scott Morris knew they had been nominated for their design work to make police officers’ front seats more usable.
Morris said Kenai is unique because they build their own police cars instead of contracting them out.
Morris: “And we still have the same police officers that use them bringing them in for routine maintenance and minor repairs so we get to talk to the police officers on a regular basis and it gives us an opportunity to find out what things they would live approved. The way Randy has the shop set up here, we have machining equipment we have welding equipment, we can build darn near anything here in the shop.”
Parrish detailed some of the changes they made…
Parrish: “We went in and redesigned the interior to allow the officer to have more room to sit in and have better visibility, we also providing them an area to where when they’re sitting in the seat their pistol wouldn’t get hung up on the console, so we took an console that was 22 inches long and made it 7 inches long and then custom fitted the parts to make it to where everything would mount on top of it, being the laptop and the printer.”
Another mechanic, Bill Lopeman also worked with them on the design.
They said they are happy with the award but never expected the recognition.