BRIGHTON —There were too many times in the 12-year career of Thornton resident Michal Michalkow as an emergency medical technician in which he arrived at a car accident scene and had to call the coroner.
He said days like that were too many to count, and it slowly wore him down.
“About a year ago, there was an accident in in a 25-mile-an-hour zone and one of them ended up dying from the crash,” Michalkow said. “It’s heartbreaking when you can’t save a life.
“I realized that it was time to change something. I wanted to save lives a different way,” he said.
So in 2013, he left his fulltime job and started a hands-on driver’s safety school called in Adams County. During class, Michalkow takes groups of EMTs, teenagers, semi-truck drivers and police officers and puts them behind the wheel of his Toyota Highlander while it’s hooked up to a hydraulic contraption called a SkidCar.
The SkidCar is a metal apparatus with four wheels that fits under a regular car. When Michalkow pushes certain buttons on a control pad from the passenger’s seat, the car begins skidding all over the road to simulate icy or wet conditions.
Michalkow has his students do figure-eight skids in a big parking lot — like the Adams County Fairgrounds in Brighton — until the students learn to calmly bring the car back out of the spinout.
“The system has been widely used in Europe for over 20 years and has been available here in the States, but not too many people take advantage of it,” Michalkow said. “We are the first to have it available to the public in Colorado. This type of hands-on training — learning to drive in inclement weather — is incredibly important.”
First Gear has deals and partnerships with several metro-area safe-driving organizations including the CDL College in Commerce City, Top Cops Driving School, Aware and Alive in Arvada, and Westminster 911 Driving.
Thornton Police Sergeant Matt Cabot trains new police officers on how to handle their squad cars when they first start their jobs. He is also a lead instructor for TopCops, where police officers teach teenagers how to drive.
“We put some of our police officers through Michal’s winter driving course as an alternative training to what we normally do, and that was very useful for them,” Cabot said. “And then when I started working for TopCops, I suggested the courses to parents whose kids really need that kind of experience.”
There are several types of classes that Michalkow and his instructing partner, professional truck driver John Reynolds, offer. It costs $249 per person for the advanced skid control class, which lasts for four hours. An ultimate distracted/defensive course (with Aware and Alive) is $299 for seven hours.
“We do this to prevent accidents and to (preemptively) cut costs,” said Chris Mulberry, paramedic assistant chief for the Platte Valley Ambulance Service in Brighton. “Our vehicles, with equipment on board, cost anywhere from $150,000 to $170,000. It’s a big expense if these ambulances get damaged. And then if my team gets hurt, if they have to be out of work or away from their families, that’s worse. It’s a small price to pay for what could go wrong.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Mmitchelldp
