Ryan Guzman wears a MTM RAD

Eddie Diaz came to Station 118 out of the Army. He had been a combat medic in Afghanistan, and the show hands him a Silver Star for it: a helicopter down under fire, Diaz getting his squad clear and then going back into the wreck for the soldier who did not make it. Ryan Guzman plays him on 9-1-1, the FOX procedural where a Los Angeles firehouse runs toward earthquakes, collapsing freeways, and the odd zoo animal loose in the city. MTM's own media page lists Guzman wearing the strangest watch the company builds, the RAD.

The RAD is a wristwatch with a Geiger counter inside it. A Geiger-Muller tube in the titanium case reads gamma radiation, both the dose reaching the wearer at a given second and the total absorbed over time, and it sounds an alarm when the count crosses a limit set in advance. Time is kept the plain way, tritium-lit hands over a small digital window, in a 46mm case sealed to 100 meters. MTM built a thousand of them, each one numbered, and the watch sold new for about 1,500 dollars.

At a house fire the radiation counter is dead weight. It earns its keep on one kind of call, the kind a firefighter can work a whole career without and cannot afford to miss, where the hazard is a leaking source or a dirty bomb instead of a grease fire. That Diaz is the one wearing it is MTM's claim, and MTM's alone. A first responder is exactly the person who might, on one bad day, actually need to know.