Ernie Gilbert Throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, coal miners knew to keep an ear tuned to the high-pitched tweets of canaries.

Because the tiny bird is so sensitive to deadly methane and carbon monoxide gases, coal miners knew that if the caged canary they brought into the mine stopped singing, it was time to get out.

Much as canaries helped signal danger to American coal miners during the Industrial Revolution, SAFER Systems, a Camarillobased company, has developed state-of-the-art technology that is used to alert many of the world’s leading chemical and petroleum plants to the release of hazardous toxins in industrial accidents.

Founded in Westlake Village in 1981, SAFER Systems is now a 26person company serving Fortune 500 clients worldwide, including British Petroleum, Dow Corning, DuPont and General Electric.

“We’ve grown quite a bit in the past four years,” said Ernie Gilbert, a Simi Valley resident and the company’s president.

SAFER Systems moved to Camarillo in 2001 and has since doubled its number of employees, according to company officials.

Its clients, Gilbert said, include 17 of the world’s top 20 chemical companies and all of the major freight railroad lines in the U.S.

The patented software SAFER Systems uses, Gilbert said, makes it “unique to the world.”

SAFER Systems combines its software with high-tech sensors to monitor the air quality surrounding chemical manufacturing plants and gas refineries. If a toxic gas is detected by the software, the sensors alert plant workers, who trigger an emergency response plan.

SAFER Systems’ software uses weather tracking stations to tell plant workers the direction, speed and size of a toxic gas cloud.

The computer program can even identify the type of chemical and predict how far it’s likely to spread.

The information, Gilbert said, can prove invaluable to fire and police departments in determining where—and if—nearby homes should be evacuated.

“We try to detect the chemical as it’s being released, and then, within a couple minutes, we want to feed information back to the plant so their emergency management team can react,” Gilbert said. “We’ve been trying to get this down to a very, very rapid decision that has to be made very quickly.”

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than 20 chemical accidents are reported each day in the U.S.

Escaped toxic gases can be deadly.

In 1984, an estimated 4,000 people were killed in Bhopal, India, when a cloud of methyl isocyanate leaked from a chemical plant, the largest industrial disaster on record.

SAFER Systems’ technology is also used by freight railroad lines in the event of derailment and an emergency spill.

“Any railroad incident that occurs in America that involves a hazardous material, it’s going to involve our software,” Gilbert said.

If a train carrying toxic material derails or spills its load, emergency response teams use handheld sensors coupled with software developed by SAFER Systems to detect the amount and type of the chemical released.

The program then uses weather information to help determine the path of the cloud and its projected size.

In addition to a sales force with offices in the United States, Canada and Spain, SAFER Systems maintains a six-person crew in Camarillo to manage technical support for the company’s clients worldwide.

Despite the sour economy, SAFER Systems has been able to grow because its international clientele doesn’t lock the company into a single economy.

“We grew 11 percent in 2009,” said Gilbert. “We’re really happy about it, considering what a bleak year 2009 turned out to be.”

He said the company continues to look at how the ever-evolving face of technology can be used to improve its software and the products it offers.

“We’re trying to get on top of how we can actually do our job better utilizing these new technologies,” he said. “Are there better ways to communicate? Are there better ways to actually do what we do?”

Gilbert cited the social networking capabilities of Twitter as a way in which his company may possibly communicate more quickly with its clients.

Which may very well mean that, like the coal miners of 19th century America, those managing the chemical plants and gas refineries of the 21st century will keep their ears open for the next tweet.