About Us

Company History

Safety One International, Inc. was founded by Art Seely in the early 1980's. While a Denver paramedic, Mr. Seely learned firsthand, that, even in a major metropolitan center where snow was an annual and predictable event, there were occasions when emergency services could not reach their patients due to severe snow storms. In 1975, he and another paramedic were dispatched at 2:00 am to treat an elderly man who was experiencing a cardiac emergency. Although the call was within the City limits of Denver, he and his partner could only get within 2 miles of their destination because of heavy snow drifts which blocked their path. They were informed that the City snow-plow crews had been pulled off the streets hours earlier for their own safety and that plow operations would not resume until daylight, which was still 4 hours away. The paramedic dispatcher explained to the patient's wife that they would not be able to reach her husband until daylight, at the earliest, and that she should call back at that time, "if your husband still needs help". A call was placed to a neighboring city's fire department, but they also were blocked by the extreme snow conditions. Amazed and disillusioned, Seely and his partner returned to their station. Art Seely never forgot that night, and the memory was instrumental in the eventual development of Safety One. He witnessed the same events replay on a much larger scale in the Denver Christmas blizzard of 1982. Soon after this, he founded a company that designed and built custom snow vehicles for clients all over the world. A natural extension of this became the first formal, and government recognized, training program for Snow Vehicle Operators. Selling off the manufacturing, design, and service portion in the early 1990's, Safety One focused on snow vehicle sales and safety training. This new company was known, initially, as the "Snow Survival School," and later became a division of Snow Operations Training Center. In the late 1990's, Snow Operations Training Center became the first operating division of Safety One, Inc. which was also founded by Mr. Seely.

In the subsequent years, Mr. Seely had the opportunity to meet some of the world's other top instructors in various safety and rescue fields at numerous speaking engagements all over the world. It was from these leaders, in their respective fields, that Mr. Seely recruited the world's foremost instructors to head up the other divisions of Safety One, Inc., including the Antenna and Tower Climbing Safety and Rescue Division, the Air Operations Training Division, the Confined Space Safety and Rescue Division, Snow Transport Specialists, as well as the Bioterrorism/NBC and Pandemic Preparedness Division. Mr. Seely believes that the key to great safety training is in having the very finest instructors, and he has staffed his company with acknowledged experts in their respective fields. Safety One continues to grow rapidly today and is the largest company of its type in the world.