This may be a first — an auto mechanic that saves people money.
A city-employed mechanic with the heart of an inventor is being hailed by the FDNY for doing more with less — and saving the city a bundle in the process.
Jomar Pichardo, 31, who’s responsible for keeping the city’s fleet of EMS ambulances running 24 hours a day, has saved the department more than $700,000 by engineering ways to refurbish ambulance batteries and car parts that the city would normally toss away and repurchase.
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro will honor Pichardo Thursday during the FDNY’s Administrative Medals and Awards ceremony.
“It feels great,” Pichardo said about the honor. “I didn’t expect any of this and now people have started coming by and congratulating me.”
In his three years with the FDNY working at the department’s Long Island City garage, Pichardo created a battery charging station that can charge 10 batteries at once. He’s also come up with a “restoration room” where ambulance parts can be cleaned and refurbished to be used again. The restoration room has led to an estimated $645,000 in savings to the FDNY, officials said.
Pichardo is also the FDNY’s MacGyver, turning an old tank found in the back of the garage into a heated cleaning unit — another $60,000 save for the department.
“We first used a power washer, but that didn’t work very well, so we improvised,” he said. “The heated unit cleans it a lot better.”
It didn’t take long for the FDNY’s higher ranks to take notice.
“Protecting life and property in our city not only requires brave first responders, it also requires many dedicated and knowledgeable civilian employees like Jomar,” Nigro said.
Pichardo created the charging station after he went to the FDNY’s parts counter and learned how many ambulance batteries were being tossed.
“We would go through 20 batteries a day,” Pichardo said. “I got a couple of ideas, so I just started setting things up and expanding the methods. Now for the price of two batteries, we can charge 10 batteries.”
Pichardo also devised a way to replace computer parts on a circuit board that can be found on every ambulance.
Before Pichardo came along, if one component on the circuit board went bad, the entire board had to be pulled out and replaced — a cost of $4,000 a pop. Now he’s soldering the boards back together with a piece he purchased from the manufacturer — at $5 apiece.
The challenges seem to come easy for Pichardo, who comes from an electronics background.
But none of his advancements could have happened without the support and encouragement of his colleagues like Louis Morbelli, his former supervisor.
“They kept an eye on me and said, ‘It’s a good idea … go with it,’ ” Pichardo said. “They helped me go forward with the ideas.”