NYC Emergency Response: 9/11 Mess Still Exists

The news that NYC fire officials have been disciplined in the wake of the Deutsche Bank fire is unsurprising, but it’s not necessarily getting at some of the root problems in the city’s response to fire and other emergencies. Coordination between agencies at Ground Zero and elsewhere has been sorely lacking for years and making the Fire Department the only scapegoat will not change this basic reality.

If we go back to September 11, 2001, when Rudy Giuliani arrived downtown, his prized ‘Command Center’ was sitting on top of a huge supply of fuel and rendered useless by falling debris. So where did he go to command the city’s response? He was told that the fire department command center was over on West St. Shortly after arriving there, the Mayor asked the fire chiefs what message he should relay to people trapped in the Towers (“Find an open stairway and get out,” the chiefs said.”), the Mayor was then hustled off to another command center, at Barclay St, with Police Commissioner Kerik and other police chiefs.

That, of course, was the end of the line of communication of Fire Department advice to remaining occupants of the Trade Center Towers— to find a stairwell, like the open stairway at the top of the South Tower, where the 18 people who ignored 9-1-1 operators’ standing orders to ‘remain in place’ successfully survived the attacks, even though they had been located above the floors where the plane entered the building. It was also the end of an opportunity for interagency communication from a police helicopter on the scene that the buildings appeared unstable, word the fire department never received before the South Tower collapsed.

Now, we know better that New York City needs an ‘informed loop’ from first responders, back to the potential victims of any emergency. Yet Lower Manhattan residents also know that they still couldn’t get information about the safety of air around the Deutsche Bank fire 10 days ago, almost seven years after 9/11. Despite their pleas to city officials to open up an e-mail, internet, or phone information system that would give out such vital information during emergencies, downtown residents’ insistence on better communication have to-date fallen on deaf ears.

Yes, the inspections at the Deutsche Bank building de-construction site revealed multiple violations. But in addition to not provoking a full Fire Department inspection, or the development of a complete firefighting plan for the building, those violations didn’t get the contractor pulled from the job until after Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia met their fate attempting to fight the fire there. Nor were a skeleton crew of fire officials sent first into the highly toxic and totally unoccupied building; instead over 100 firefighters were sent in. And this again occurs almost seven years after over three hundred firefighters lost their lives inside buildings. Even then, the upper echelons of the department knew high-rise fires of that magnitude couldn’t be successfully fought.

Some time after 9/11, our present Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said, “There would be a dramatic difference” in how the Department would respond to “a similar occurrence” today. Yet there seems not to have been a coordinated effort to make sure the word has percolated down to every level since then. Today, Commissioner Scoppetta pledged that, "We need the unvarnished truth about what happened here, or, as the mayor said, what didn’t happen. So, we will recognize, acknowledge and learn from our mistakes and we will hold everybody accountable, no matter where this investigation takes us.”

Let’s hope that rather than simply blaming fire officials or canning a few of them after the Deutsche Bank fiasco, the Mayor will take the effort citywide to coordinate government self-assessment and responses. He needs to make obsolete the assessment of 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman that NYC’s command and control communications in 2001 were, “not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.” New York as a governmental structure still has some serious work to do. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 9/11 for us to accomplish it.