By Katie Logisz
June 21, 2004

How will you respond to a major crisis? It's a question that city leaders are faced with each day in the post-9/11 era. And it relates to more than potential terrorist attacks — everything from natural disasters to hazardous material spills can mean loss of life and infrastructure.

Helping cities answer this question is the mission of SentryPoints, a command and control software development and threat and vulnerability assessment firm. SentryPoints enables cities to have the tools to see where they are vulnerable, manage daily safety and security operations, plan their response to crises, and react to and recover from major incidents.

According to Paul Helmke, chairman of SentryPoints, no matter what kind of emergency a city faces, the challenges involved in responding effectively are remarkably similar. SentryPoints' assists the city in quickly assessing, monitoring and commanding the situation; communicating effectively with local fire, rescue, and police; and coordinating efforts with state and federal agencies.

Helmke, former Fort Wayne mayor and past-president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, knows first-hand how valuable such a system can be. A 1997 Labor Day warehouse fire involving over a half million tires forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes in a large section of the city.

"We had the fire department, police department, and state environmental management people on the job — hundreds of people from different agencies," Helmke says. "Getting everyone communicating, determining who was in charge, and coordinating the response was a huge challenge. We did well and got everyone evacuated safely, but we would have done better if we had had an effective system in place to help."

SentryPoints' core systems and approach are the creation of Don Willis, SentryPoints' founder, and are the same as those used by the U.S. Army to monitor and evaluate combat situations and control troop movements in Iraq. Willis sold his previous company, Command Systems, Inc. to General Dynamics C4 Systems; C4 Systems remains a U.S. military supplier as well as strategic alliance partner to SentryPoints in serving the civilian market.

SentryPoints will be a featured presenter at the 72nd Annual Conference of Mayors in Boston, June 25-29. Helmke will be in Boston and available to meet with any mayor interested in discussing SentryPoints and how it can assist cities in all types of emergency situations. For more information, please contact Kathryn Kretschmer-Weyland with the United States Conference of Mayors at 301-460-5251 or email her at kweyland@usmayors.org or Katie Logisz at 202-861-6703 or klogisz@usmayors.org.