Preparedness: New York City Not As Ready As Its Residents

Any assessment of safety at Ground Zero, both before and after 9/11 has to focus in part on preparedness. If there is an American city that should prepare for high-rise fires, evacuations, toxic material releases, and terrorist attacks, it’s New York City. We know our city is a bullseye for groups with a grudge against the United States, Zionism, Capitalism, gays, liberals, foreigners, and pretty much anybody’s Great Satan. We’re equal opportunity. We also have lots of skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, construction sites, toxic hazards and landmarks to protect.

We’d like to think that in New York, we’re not surprised by the unforeseen. Our leaders, however, have not always been so interested in preparation. Ever since 9/11, we’ve heard endless stories about Rudy Giuliani’s preparedness and kinship with first responders, yet his record in New York City regarding safety and preparedness was pretty dismal.

In 1993, New Yorkers got our first major taste of global terrorism. A bomb went off in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. The FBI called the detonated charge the, “largest by weight and by damage that we’ve seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification.” This bomb killed six people, caused a complete evacuation of the WTC towers, and nearly toppled the Vista Hotel above the garage. The hotel teetered for most of a day, until it was structurally reinforced. The terrorist bomb there surely contained a large charge of sodium cyanide as well, which luckily burned, rather than vaporizing, which would have killed thousands instantly.

The terrorist who planned the attack, Ramzi Yousef, vowed on his capture and return from Pakistan that the Trade Center would be successfully taken down, sooner or later. In fact, his Islamic terrorist group had also planned a series of simultaneous major attacks against New York City landmarks: bombs that would have struck the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the United Nations, and FBI headquarters in New York as well. Fortunately, those attacks were thwarted by the FBI, preventing untold panic and loss of life in the city.

Yet, after the experience of the early 90’s, New York City had done little by September 11, 2001 to harden targets or improve first responder planning for major disasters, whether intentional or accidental. The city allowed the World Trade Center’s owner, the Port Authority of NY and NJ, to be exempt from building codes that would have hardened stairwells, provided safe egress without exposing occupants to falling debris, tightened inspection standards, and allowed the roof egress that had provided a rescue point by Police helicopter in 1993.

In addition, the metropolis whose Mayor told the 9/11 Commission, “I assumed from the day I came into office that New York City would be the subject of a terrorist attack,” located its only emergency command center at the heart of the Trade Center site. It was built above ground, in a building loaded up with 43,284 gallons of fuel on the day terrorists once again struck the complex, eight years later. The emergency command center became a useless, burning inferno on the day of the attacks, from which the Mayor who had vetoed a hardened Brooklyn bunker site would flee under the warm glow of television cameras. Ironically, it was this televised flight that emblazoned Rudy Giuliani into our minds as ‘America’s Mayor.’

New York’s Office of Emergency Management, which was headed on 9/11 by a poorly respected and ineffective leader, responded to the attacks, ad hoc, at the site of the fire incident commander, largely ignored by both Police and Fire officials. The 9/11 Commission point-man for its city response study described the activities of Richie Sheirer, OEM’s head, in the following way, “Richie should have early on pulled together an interagency command post. But he didn’t command respect. He was lost. He was on his cell but he wasn’t talking to the Police Department of Fire Department incident commanders. There was an enormous breakdown in the operations of OEM.”

It’s not that there weren’t other models. The first head of NYC’s OEM, Jerry Hauer, left the job after receiving no support from the Mayor in his battles to attain leverage with the Police and Fire Departments, each of which warred constantly over turf and saw a strong OEM as a threat to their respective goals of supremacy. The Port Authority, from which Mayor Giuliani fiercely attempted to wrest away profitable city airports, actually offered far more city control than NYC ever took when it came to fire code cooperation at the Trade Center. The fact is, the city under Giuliani didn’t prioritize safety around the Trade Center area on an even par with combating petty crime or squeegee beggars.

Now that the Deutche Bank building has once again become a disaster site, causing more first responder deaths, hopefully, a complete review of preparedness and provision for safer, centralized, orderly response will finally be forthcoming. We need better overall coordination between citywide agencies. The question of competent inspection and detailed planning to respond to major city building fires and landmark incidents needs a long, hard look, without a glossing over of the immediate post-9/11 variety.

(main sources: the 9/11 Commission Report and Grand Illusion by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins)

Comments

[Raj]

You may be right but hats off to American security agencies because after 9/11, there hasn't been a single act of terrorism on American soil! the arabs may hate America but the rest of the world loves it for taking a stand. (it went overboard but that's a different story!)