Emergency planning on the rise since 9/11

More planning, more collaboration, more innovation and more business.

Those are some of the major changes that security professionals and business leaders on Long Island point to since that day 10 years ago when two planes hit the World Trade Center and rocked the country.

While certainly there's been an emphasis on antiterrorist-related resources, experts say emergency planning overall -- such as for extreme weather or a health pandemic -- also has been on the rise.

Sept. 11 "brought to people a consciousness of all sorts of vulnerabilities that already existed, but they were never cognizant of or motivated to do anything about," said Vincent E. Henry, director of the Homeland Security Management Institute at Long Island University, an online certificate and degree program launched in 2004.

Public-private sector partnerships have popped up where federal, state and local agencies share a wide array of public safety information, such as alerts and trends, with those in private sector businesses and organizations, said Frank Catalano. He's director of security for New York Institute of Technology, Central Islip campus and chairman of the Long Island Chapter of ASIS International, a group for security professionals. "You didn't see that 10 years ago," Catalano said.

Such agencies are also collaborating on the development of new technologies to aid first responders. Both government agencies and 16 private companies are housed at the Morrelly Homeland Security Center, opened last year in Bethpage. The center is designed to bring together "technology providers and first responders who need their technology," said Bill Wahlig, on the board of the Applied Science Foundation for Homeland Security, which operates the center.

The center's first product, a browser that lets users view multiple pieces of information on a single screen, was shipped in July to the U.S. Homeland Security Department.

Sept. 11 also "triggered a wave of innovation around video," said Elan Moriah, president of Verint Video Intelligence Solutions, a division of Melville-based Verint Systems Inc. The company has developed software that allows clients, including large companies and government agencies, to access videos in real time and quickly find the actionable information. Before Sept. 11, he said, video was viewed as more of a "forensic tool" akin to airplanes' black boxes.

Economic development and job market experts say they have no data on the size of the homeland security sector on Long Island or the numbers of people employed in it. Still, more than 3,470 people are now working in security roles at major airports servicing Long Island -- LaGuardia, MacArthur and Kennedy -- employed by the Transportation Security Administration, founded in the wake of Sept. 11.

Mario Doyle, New York regional director for ASIS International, estimates growth in the area's security business sector overall to have been about 15 percent in the past decade.

Nicholas Auletta, vice president of Uniondale-based Summit Security Services Inc., which provided security guards to the World Trade Center, said that business has grown an average 5 percent to 10 percent a year, as 9/11 "raised security awareness" for many companies.

Among the firm's clients are airlines, government agencies, large companies. Several of his staff operate the state-of-the-art global command center at Islandia-based CA Technologies, where access control and security are monitored for all the company's locations.