Return to ground zero

Medical Examiner's Office Helped by Stratford Firm to Handle Tragedy
(From CONNECTICUT POST, September 9, 2002)

By MEG BARONE
Correspondent

Returning from a business trip to Canada in the early morning hours of September 11, 2001, Richard Zboray glanced over at the World Trade Center as his plane flew passed the New York landmark.

"It was one of those reassuring sites; a reminder we're back home," said Zboray, of Stratford.

Eight hours later a smoldering, twisted mass had replaced the twin towers, and the company Zboray works for found itself at the center of the recovery efforts, not at ground zero but in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

A year later, the British-based Sapphire Ltd, Inc. -- which has a sales and support office in Stratford, is still involved. Two of its employees continue to work daily at the OCME in New York City.

Naeem Ullah, Sapphire's chief technical consultant, and Adrian Jones, an independent consultant for Sapphire, have adapted Sapphire's DataEase computer software database to accommodate the changing needs of the OCME. Ullah and Jones had to alter the program almost daily as a result of the volume and type of work OCME staffers had to undertake relative to the events of Sept. 11.

The World Trade Center related work at the OCME from September through last June cost $24 million, and they have budgeted another $35 million for this fiscal year, Brondolo said.

The software program is used to track the 19,855 recovered remains, DNA samples that go out for testing to help in the identification process, all written correspondence related to the victims and oral communications with victims' family members. The software is also used to issue death certificates.

According to the OCME's latest figures, which were recently revised downwards, a total of 2,801 people were reported missing from the World Trade Center. Of which the remains of 1,389 have been identified.

For those families whose loved ones have not yet been identified, the OCME set up Memorial Park on East 30th Street. It is a temporary resting place for the victims, which will be maintained until the identification process is completed.

Memorial Park is not open to the public. Only family members are allowed to visit the sacred space, which is also a work environment. DataEase is used to issue family badges and track visits.

Sapphire's DataEase has been the mainstay for supporting OCME operations for years, according to OCME Deputy Commissioner Thomas Brondolo, but immediately after the terrorist attack, he knew they had to start rewriting and developing new applications for the Sapphire product.

"Even our pre-planned databases for emergencies couldn't handle something of this magnitude, which was completely unique and unprecedented," Brondolo said.

"There were disaster management plans in place but there was no specifically written software to manage this kind of a disaster, because nobody in their wildest dreams imagined this kind of a situation would ever happen. So there were no rules to start with. The rules were defined as we were going along. We had to accommodate the new developments as they came in," said Ullah, who began reporting to the OCME on September 12th.

Jones, from England, joined the team in New York two weeks later, when air traffic resumed.

"They began putting information together very quickly in a chaotic situation. There was no time to design the perfect (technical) architecture," said Zboray, Sapphire's vice president of operations.

"We definitely went into uncharted territory," said Shiya Ribowsky, deputy director of investigations. Ribowsky is in charge of the victims' identification process.

Usually programmers spend weeks or months planning a computer program before it is installed but they had to go into production immediately, Zboray said.

The volume of work in the OCME related to the Sept. 11th attack required about 50 workers and volunteers to use the software database all at the same time 24 hours a day seven days a week, Ullah said. The situation did not allow for a lengthy interruption of the computer system to allow programmers to modify the software.

"Almost every day we had a new challenge, and we had to change some of the core structure of how we actually operate. In the early days (after the disaster) it was very stressful because we had to make changes on the fly and there was no room for error," Ullah said.

They knew what they had to achieve, imagined the result and redesigned the software program to fit their needs as it was in use, he said.

"We had no time to test the system, to down the (computer) system and then upload the changes. We had to make the changes on a live system," said Ullah, who refers to the challenge as "extreme programming."

DataEase is used by the medical investigators to collect personal information from victims' family members to help with the identification of the remains -- from what they were wearing on Sept. 11th, if they had distinguishing marks -- such as tattoos, if they were wearing rings or other jewelry, dental records and information about DNA samples collected from victims' personal belongings or blood relatives to make initial IDs.

"You need a really sophisticated tracking system in place to map and track all of this information," Ribowsky said. "It's more complicated than our existing software is designed to handle," he said.

They had to design the software to solve problems but also to train volunteers. "We had to keep in mind, in terms of design, that is be simple, efficient, easy to use," said Ullah, while maintaining the data integrity, Zboray added.

Because of the large number of volunteers, many of whom had not served as data entry clerks, Jones built some computer screens to guide people through the workings of the program to prevent them from entering incorrect information.

"Disaster management has changed. You don't manage a disaster with a shovel or a bull dozer or a bull horn. Today you manage disasters with a computer," Ribowsky said.

Without the use of the computer program, "the vast majority of the people would not have been identified, we would not have been able to keep track of the remains, we would not have been able to return them to the families," he said.

"Ten years ago you didn't manage a disaster with a computer. Today, the bottom line is, the backbone of any disaster response is going to be your MIS system, and we were really fortunate because we got the best," Ribowsky said, referring to the Sapphire software and employees.

"Software is important but the people that write the software, the people that translate the process and put them together to me are much more important," Brondolo said.

"We long ago lost sight of the fact that they work for Sapphire. They are an integral part of the system," Ribowsky said.