I was the technical writer who provided the online help, user guides, and training materials for the
security administration and staff at World Trade Center.
Ensec Inc (known in Brazil as Engenharia e Sistemas de Seguranca) won the $27 million contract
to design and install a new security system for 110 floors of each twin tower of the World Trade Center, after the terrorism bomb attack in February of 1993 closed the parking garage for several years.
Our competitors included IBM and Unisys. In Brazil, our company provided the security system for IBM Brazil. Our Director of Development, Steven Geffin, and I had both come from the Development Group at CASI, the security company that provided electronic security for IBM worldwide (except for Brazil) and we joined Ensec when it established its U.S. headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida.
My task was to provide the online help, user guides, and training materials for the security administration and staff at WTC. Our Implementation Team provided onsite training to groups of end users in a training room on the 90TH floor with a LAN of 20 PCs, each assigned to one end user, and connected to a microcontroller and proximity readers that we used to simulate an access control event, such as an attempted entry by a driver or vehicle without an assigned access badge. This hands-on training allowed security staff or administrators to practice responses and security overrides per their established business rules.
I trained over 100 security operators, and our Director of Development trained all of the system administrators.
We completed the WTC project in 1996, and five years later 9-11 occurred.
