Newfoundland safety software helped protect 9/11 cleanup crews

As Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks this week with a commemorative service and an extended run of the musical Come From Away, Wayne Pardy, health, safety, environmental and quality (HSEQ) manager at Quality Plus Inc. in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, is recalling a lesser-known chapter from that period: how the safety software he helped build protected cleanup crews working at the World Trade Center site.

Pardy co-founded Q5 Systems in 1997 alongside Brian Dicks and John Lukins, building a safety and quality audit platform out of St. John's that would eventually serve clients across the aviation, insurance and industrial sectors. In an interview with Canadian Occupational Safety, Pardy said the company's connection to the World Trade Center cleanup began, by coincidence, the week before the attacks.

(Wayne Pardy in Washington, D.C., on September 9, 2001)

A chance meeting before the towers fell

Pardy was in Washington, D.C. the week before the attacks, travelling with Labelmaster, a U.S. hazardous materials compliance company that had licensed Q5's audit software under its own brand. The two companies were touring Labelmaster's client base in the capital, including federal agencies, and one of the meetings was with Liberty Mutual Insurance.

"I left Washington on the 10th," Pardy said. "The day before, I had my picture taken in front of the White House. That was all good. Then I got back in the office the next day and walked in, and all the guys had the televisions on."

Nothing came of that first meeting with Liberty Mutual before the attacks, Pardy said, and the U.S. market froze in the immediate aftermath. It was four to five months later, once the initial response had settled, that Liberty Mutual called back. The insurer had been awarded the City of New York's contract covering both workers' compensation and injury prevention for personnel working the cleanup site, and wanted a mobile tool to track field conditions. The relationship was corroborated in a Fall 2006 profile of Q5 Systems in VISION Newfoundland and Labrador, a Government of Newfoundland and Labrador business publication, which named Liberty Mutual as the company's largest client at the time.

Tracking protective equipment shift by shift

According to Pardy, Liberty Mutual built a program it called Managing for Vital Performance, using Q5's software loaded onto PalmPilot handhelds, then a newly available mobile technology. Three eight-hour shifts of observers worked the site around the clock, logging whether workers, from uniformed police and firefighters to contractors and civilians, were wearing respiratory protection equipment suited to hazardous airborne conditions as fires continued to burn beneath the rubble.

Each shift's PalmPilots were synced at Liberty Mutual's office, with the data processed overnight and returned as a printed summary identifying the site's highest-risk areas for the next crew. "They were almost in real time being able to post and react to very critical, high-risk practices that the response and emergency folks were using on the pile," Pardy said.

Pardy said the setup was an early version of the digital safety management systems that have since become standard practice across Canadian workplaces, though he's cautious about overstating its impact on a site where consistent protection was difficult to enforce. "I don't know how effective it was," he said. "It was just getting the protective equipment to the fellas, getting them to wear it, getting them to wear it consistently."

Pardy calls the experience bittersweet. "What I've always looked back on with kind of a bittersweet memory is, like a lot of people, a lot of pretty horrendous, surreal thoughts and images of that day," he said. "But then on the other side of it, in a bit of a guilty kind of way, I'm thinking if that had not happened, then the guys at Q5, myself, would have never had this opportunity to help the people of New York and Liberty and the people who were cleaning it up use our software tool to help protect the people on site who were tasked with the cleanup."

Lessons for today's emergency response planning

Pardy, who has gone on to author several HSEQ auditing books, said the episode still shapes how he thinks about acute, high-hazard response scenarios, distinct from routine day-to-day operations. He is currently involved in CSA Group technical committee work on updates to Z45001, the Canadian-specific adaptation of the international ISO 45001 occupational health and safety standard.

Asked what today's safety leaders should take from the story beyond its human interest, Pardy pointed to the physical and psychological risk faced by responders themselves. "Post-traumatic stress disorder is just as relevant to those responders, first responders, as it is to people fighting in wars," he said, adding that emergency response plans need to include post-traumatic stress support for first responders, not only physical protective measures.

Pardy said the same principle applies well beyond an event of 9/11's scale. "Even these smaller disasters or emergencies can equally be as stressing and can equally pose physical and psychological risk to those responders as well," he said.

Q5 Systems continues to operate out of St. John's. Pardy's most recent title, co-authored with Terri Andrews of Quality Plus Inc., is a new HSEQ auditing reference guide for safety professionals published earlier this year.