August 2001: New York Office of Emergency Management Buys Crisis Management Software that Will Be Used after 9/11

New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) purchases crisis management computer software that it plans to launch for use on September 17, and that will significantly help the city’s response to the 9/11 attacks. [Wall Street Journal, 10/23/2001; Wired News, 11/2/2001] The OEM is intended to improve New York’s response to major incidents, including terrorist attacks, and play a key role in managing the city’s overall response to an incident. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 283-284] The software it buys, called E Team, is an emergency and event management product created by E Team Inc., a small company based in Canoga Park, California. [Wall Street Journal, 10/23/2001; e-ProWire, 5/22/2002] John Hughes, a vice president of E Team Inc., in fact used to be the deputy director of the New York City OEM. E Team was originally created for use by the military in battlefield coordination, but the software can now be used by public agencies and private companies, to “prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters and emergencies of all types.” [Los Angeles Times, 12/11/2000; California Technology Ventures, 10/16/2001; Wired News, 11/2/2001] It enables officials to coordinate thousands of workers and hundreds of agencies. [Wall Street Journal, 10/23/2001] The OEM plans to install the software on special server computers in its Emergency Operations Center on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7, and to launch the E Team system on September 17. [Wired News, 11/2/2001; Council of the City of New York, 8/2002, pp. 22 ] But as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, the system will instead go into use on September 14, at OEM’s temporary command center at Pier 92 on the Hudson River (see September 14, 2001). [Wall Street Journal, 10/23/2001; e-ProWire, 5/22/2002] Every government organization supporting the OEM command center after 9/11 will use E Team to coordinate its rescue and recovery efforts with the OEM. [California Technology Ventures, 10/16/2001] A report later published by New York City Council’s Select Committee on Technology in Government will say it is ironic that the OEM decides to buy the E Team software in the month before the terrorist attacks in New York take place. The report will comment that the OEM buys the software “in order to better manage precisely the emergency situations that the city faced after 9/11.” [Council of the City of New York, 8/2002, pp. 22 ]