Posted on 08/20/2002 12:02:23 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
ayor Michael R. Bloomberg promised yesterday to make major changes in how the New York Police and Fire Departments handle future catastrophes, including improvements in technology and basic emergency procedures. At the plan's core is an ambitious goal: a profound change in the culture of the Police and Fire Departments, two agencies with a long history of rivalry.
Among the most significant technological changes is a proposal to outfit high-rise buildings throughout the city with special equipment to boost the radio signals rescuers use. In procedural changes, fire chiefs will now routinely ride in police helicopters to gauge a cataclysm from the air. And the police will stage their responses from a safe distance, preventing too many officers from rushing in too soon. These and other proposals were included in an independent consultant's two reports, whose final versions were released yesterday, about the agencies' responses to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The most elemental change, perhaps, is the effort to foster cooperation between firefighters and police officers, from the rank and file to the top chiefs, the mayor said. The two departments have a long history of competition that stretches back generations. Friction at emergency scenes is legendary. They are even stubborn foes on the athletic fields, where shoving matches have been known to break out on the sidelines.
"Interagency competition may be unavoidable, and even healthy to some extent, but it can never impair our ability to respond to emergencies," Mayor Bloomberg said. "The stakes are just too high."
To make his point, the mayor was flanked by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta and other top officials from both departments, deliberately shuffled together. The reports are not considered codified into city policy, said one city official. Rather, they are tools that can be used at the will of the city and the two agencies, to pick and choose what they like and discard the rest. It is yet to be determined how many of the proposals the departments adopt.
The reports come after about five months in which McKinsey & Company, a corporate consultant best known for its expertise in management practices, interviewed fire and police officials, reviewed tapes of audio transmissions from that day, read computer files and operational logs and spoke with outside experts.
But the city was careful not to present the research into the response as an all-encompassing investigation or as a moment-by-moment re-creation of what happened. The reports themselves acknowledged that the hundreds of interviews represented only a small fraction of the thousand or more people who responded in some way to the attacks. Nonetheless, the officials said that the research had been exhaustive enough to base their recommendations on it and to find out, as Mayor Bloomberg phrased it, what worked and what did not, to better prepare for any future cataclysm.
After attending scores of wakes, funerals, memorial Masses and other solemn ceremonies in 11 months, Mr. Bloomberg said: "There is no doubt in my mind that we are doing today what the heroes of 9/11 would have wanted us to do. It is in that spirit that we present these reports."
Details from the reports have been known for weeks, after drafts were obtained by The New York Times. Copies of the final reports were to be distributed to firehouses and the survivors of the more than 2,800 people who were killed.
The consultant charged the city only for out-of-pocket costs, like travel expenses, but not for things like the production of the reports or the hours logged in preparing it. Those fees amounted to $75,000 for the Fire Department and less than $20,000 for the Police Department, said Andrew Giangola, a McKinsey spokesman.
According to the consultant, the Fire Department was plagued by problems in radio communication, lapses in discipline and a lack of coordinated efforts with a Police Department that itself suffered from leadership lapses, coordination problems and a lack of proper planning and training, according to the more than 250 combined pages of the reports. (The Fire Department report is 169 pages; the Police Department report is 88 pages.)
In recommending improvements for the Fire Department, the consultant said it should fortify its hazardous materials unit, develop mutual aid agreements with other agencies and improve its communications and operational preparedness. The Police Department, it said, should enhance the way it mobilizes officers and clearly define the roles of its top officials in the event of a disaster.
In many cases, the city independently identified many of the problems, the mayor said. In the case of the Police Department, for example, one of Mr. Kelly's first acts was to establish a counterterrorism bureau and to expand the department's Intelligence Division. Mr. Kelly has also outfitted officers with radiation detection equipment and has augmented catastrophe planning, including creating redundant command centers and a plan for continuity of command in an emergency.
Mr. Scoppetta has begun to try to improve the radio communication system, though he noted that there is no perfect portable radio that will function perfectly in a city of concrete and steel high rises. Specifically, he said, new radios will be used in regular fire operations in Staten Island, beginning next Monday. A study will be done to determine if the Police Department's elaborate repeater system, designed to boost the signal of the radios, can also support or aid the Fire Department radios.
Among the major findings of the report was that firefighters, in their zeal to respond, often disregarded procedures that were created to protect them and others. For example, the report said, many firefighters ignored orders to go to certain staging areas. Others simply assigned themselves to the twin towers, although the report said only 4 of 200 units had done that.
The report also noted that several other units had kept calling dispatchers to assign them until dispatchers finally relented, and this made the scene hard to control.
Since Jan. 1, officials from both departments have begun to meet regularly, and have established an interagency senior executive coordinating committee to review and resolve operational issues. In the field, joint incident command, with top officials from each department standing next to each other, needs to be reinforced, a senior fire official said.
Some officials have questioned, however, whether the research was extensive enough to be the basis for the reports' conclusions. Others have said that a long study was not needed to point out problems that have been evident for years.
And the reports left major questions unanswered, especially what went wrong with the radio communication that day. Although the report points out the difficulty some commanders encountered in using a device to boost the radio signal, it makes no mention of an audiotape discovered later, in the search, that Port Authority officials say confirms that the device actually did work.
Mr. Giangola said that the consultant was legally prohibited from commenting on the tapes. But he said that the tape was listened to and that it confirmed their recommendations.
"You do need to ask the question, `Was there any information that they did not use in compiling the report?' " said Jim Slevin, vice president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association. "And if so, would that information have been helpful in making some of these recommendations?"
In another unexplained discrepancy, the authors chose to adopt a figure of 25,000 as the number of people evacuated from the towers that day, although other analysts have placed the number at half that.
"I think the effort over all is inadequate," said Charles R. Jennings, an assistant professor of fire science and public administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who noted that he had not read the reports.
"I think the fact that we had two separate investigations, each one of which was captive to a particular agency, is a problem," he said.
Chuckie
Crusty
Blunderberg
Sorry, but it was your choice, now you must live with them.
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