BUSINESS: Disaster Management Company Sees Success After Tragedy
By Joe Smilor on November 7, 2008 6:00 PM, San Bernardino Sun
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were a rude awakening for many Americans. For Los Angeles County firefighter Dennis Ortiz, it also awakened a need for his company, Disaster Management Systems Inc.
The Pomona-based company, created in 1996, developed a new system for dealing with large-scale emergencies.
"We were doing OK as a company but were struggling a lot to keep the doors open. Then 9/11 hit, and that's a whole other story," Ortiz said.
President Bush required that all entities receiving federal money develop an emergency preparedness plan, which instantly increased the demand for Disaster Management Systems, Ortiz said.
The National Incident Management System has been adopted throughout the nation, and Ortiz's company designs its product based on that template.
"It's really beneficial to the first responders because everyone is speaking the same language, so to speak, and that's when our company really took off," Ortiz said.
One innovation was modernizing the triage tag, Ortiz said.
These tags are used by paramedics and fire departments to help identify which victims need to be taken to a hospital immediately, who can wait for treatment and who is dead.
"We looked at the triage tag, which hadn't been updated since the Cold War, and it was printed on cardboard, it deteriorated, it couldn't undergo decontamination," Ortiz said. "We needed a triage tag that could be exposed to the decontamination solution without falling apart, so that was our first challenge."
Robert Mudd, who was a printer at the time, joined the company and is now co-owner. He developed the ink that would be used on the new plastic-paper triage tags.
From there, the company developed multicasualty kits, which are now used across the United States and in other counties.
"We've had a lot of inquiries from Latin countries because we have a tag in Spanish, and there's a lot of talk about doing an Arabic language tag for the Middle East as well," Mudd said.
The kits include color-coded vests and tarps, triage tags, clipboards and responsibility cards for people if disaster strikes.
Hospitals, convalescent homes, long-term care facilities, schools and emergency operating centers are just some of the organizations that have bought the kits.
"It's a real niche market," Ortiz said. "When we first started, we used to go to disaster-preparedness conferences, and it was maybe us and two or three other people, but now, after 9/11, it's an industry. There are usually several hundred vendors that have just happened on the scene."
Ortiz and Mudd say their company is leading the market because of Ortiz's experience as a firefighter and the age of the business.
Ortiz "really understands the operation versus somebody out there who is not really in the business," Mudd said. "We've seen a lot of those kind of people come and go who didn't really understand the process, and they tried it and it didn't really work for them."
The company originally started in a garage where the triage tags were being made.
In 1996, "when we started developing this stuff, we tried to give it away because we thought it was a good idea, and no one wanted it," Ortiz said. "We said, 'This is a good idea. We're on to something here,' so we started a small company in our garages and started selling triage tags. Then 9/11 hit, and everything took off."
Before 2001, many Americans did not feel threatened by weapons of mass destruction or even natural disasters, Ortiz said.
"We'd never been attacked," he said. "Pearl Harbor was the last real assault on our country.
We'd been living in a Disneyland world for a long time, and then all of a sudden 9/11 hit and everyone went, 'Whoa, this is for real.' "
"That woke everybody up immediately," he continued. "It took something as big as 9/11 to drive that home, but it did it very successfully."
sandra.emerson@inlandnewspapers.com
The 4-1-1:
Disaster Management Systems Inc.
OWNER: Dennis Ortiz and Robert Mudd
ADDRESS: 2651 Pomona Blvd., Pomona 91768
PHONE: (909) 594-9596
WEB SITE: www.triagetags.com