Out of tragedy sometimes rises opportunity.

One of America's most tragic days was April 20, 1999, when two teenage gunmen opened fire at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 13 people before killing themselves.

How can anything so horrific be the genesis of a business? That's exactly the case at Seattle's Prepared Response Inc., whose origins can be directly traced to the Columbine tragedy. The company, founded to help officials manage their reaction to such emergencies, took another step forward last week by raising $1.2 million from investors, bringing to $2.5 million the total since its creation in September 2000.

The shootings, and the confused police response at the Jefferson County, Colo., school clearly spotlighted the need for law enforcement response teams to effectively communicate with each other at disaster sites. At Columbine, the response was not well-coordinated, and those who responded to the emergency were not well-informed.

Terrified high school students who witnessed the carnage were providing details to police officers and sheriff's deputies, sometimes drawing maps of the school on the dusty hoods of police cruisers. Inside the school, fire alarms were blaring and sprinkler systems were drenching the interior. TV-news helicopters were flying low -- perhaps too low -- in an effort to provide live images of the tragedy.

Who was responsible for turning off the utilities? Who can turn off the sprinklers? Who has a map of the classrooms? Who can tell the news helicopters to fly farther away from the site? At Columbine, there wasn't one person to turn to who had all the necessary information.

In Washington state, emergency officials saw the ill-prepared response and wondered what would happen if something similar happened here. They did not want to make the same mistakes made in Jefferson County.

Ed Troyer, who was and still is the public information officer for the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, is one of many who believes that without advance preparations a tragedy like Columbine would garner the same reaction from local emergency responders.

So nine months after the Columbine shooting, Troyer and 14 other county officials went to Colorado to visit the school, trying to understand what went wrong with Jefferson County law enforcement's response and what could be done better.

"They learned their lesson the hard way. Nobody realized something of that magnitude" could happen at a school, Troyer said. The Pierce County officials studied the events at Columbine, each concentrating on a different area of response.

With employees from the Pierce County fire departments, paramedics, SWAT teams, county administrators and department of emergency response personnel all taking notes, they came back armed with information. Visiting the scene of the school shooting was tough; inputting the data they gleaned into a workable document was also tough. But the data -- the information that emergency responders will need when activated -- eventually was assembled into a program.

"It's the basic stuff -- how to mitigate a situation," Troyer said. From that "basic stuff" evolved a response plan accessible by computer that emergency crews can use when they're called to the scene of a disaster.

Executives at Prepared Response took notice the plan and in June 2001, they purchased the rights from the county to commercialize the system via a technology transfer contract, said CEO Jim Finnell. Today, Prepared Response is selling the technology to government entities, calling the product Rapid Responder. It is also broadening its functions to serve to the risk-management business community as well, he said.

The product, Finnell said, proved its mettle during a September incident in Spokane, when a teenager brought a gun to Lewis and Clark High School and was shot and wounded by SWAT team members. Police arrived with maps and vital information of the school in hand. Having that information, Finnell said, may have prevented additional violence. (The lone casualty was the student shooter.)

The current technological offering has been tweaked a little since it was created by Pierce County, but at its heart remains the information gleaned after the visit to Columbine.

What began as an effort by a governmental entity to prevent a possible calamity in the aftermath of a disaster now is a potentially profit-making product for a Seattle company.

Finnell said that if his company's product can prevent one tragedy or save one life -- he compared it to auto seat belts or building sprinkler systems -- then the company's small-business evolution will be complete.