By Corey Kilgannon, The New York Times
A fund that could have helped New York City improve emergency communications between its Fire and Police Departments has been eliminated from the federal budget, Senator Charles E. Schumer said yesterday.
By cutting a $54 million nationwide grant to help municipalities improve communications between their emergency response agencies, including an estimated $6 million that could have gone to New York City, the Department of Homeland Security “pulled the rug out from under our cops and firefighters,” Mr. Schumer said at a news conference in front of a firehouse on East 51st Street that lost 10 firefighters on Sept. 11, 2001.
To illustrate the need to revamp the city’s emergency radio systems, Mr. Schumer cited a report, done for the Fire Department, that faulted radio communications after the attack. Mr. Schumer said the failures were partly to blame for the deaths of about 120 of the 343 firefighters who died in the attack on the World Trade Center.
The lack of radio communication between police and fire officials came into sharp relief during the investigation into the city’s response to the terrorist attack. After the trade center’s south tower collapsed, a police helicopter unit sent a radio message saying that the north tower also looked ready to fall, some 21 minutes before it did. Many police officers heard the message and were able to escape, but firefighters’ radios were not linked to police radios and apparently never heard the warnings. At least 121 firefighters, most in striking distance of safety, died when the north tower fell. The city’s police and fire commissioners have since moved to improve communications between the two departments.
Mr. Schumer said failing to finance improvements to the radio system leaves the city vulnerable to another disaster, and he said the federal grant program was the only one specifically set up to help integrate emergency radio systems.
A spokesman for Mr. Schumer said yesterday that Department of Homeland Security officials told the senator’s office last week that the fund that provided $54 million last year for improving radio interoperability would not be repeated in this year’s antiterrorism budget. The spokesman said that New York City would have been eligible for up to $6 million of the allocation had it been repeated this year .
Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said yesterday that the money was not eliminated, but rather was consolidated into the department’s full domestic preparedness budget to be allocated to state governments to spend as they choose.
“The Department of Homeland Security has provided $7 billion to $8 billion to state and local governments within the past seven months,” he said. “The president has requested another $3.6 billion for fiscal year 2005, some of which can be used for interoperability communications.”
A Fire Department spokesman, Francis X. Gribbon, said yesterday that fire officials can share certain radio channels with police officials, but that overhauling communications structures and creating a comprehensive plan for emergency commanders to communicate without interfering with intradepartmental communications is an immense task. But it is a task that fire officials are undertaking with other city emergency response agencies, including the Police Department and the Office of Emergency Management, he said.
“The department is working on a protocol to link us to the police,” Mr. Gribbon said, “but it’s very complicated to take the disparate radio systems of various agencies and allow them to merge at an emergency scene on a large scale with many channels.”
Among other improvements made since Sept. 11, he said, the department replaced its radios a year ago with new ones that “give us more capacity for interoperability with the Police Department.”
“While the department now has new radios that offer us improvements both for internal uses and interoperability with other agencies, more money would certainly be crucial in helping us further enhance the technology and the protocol,” Mr. Gribbon said.
As for firefighters being able to communicate with police helicopters in a large emergency, “that issue has been resolved,” he said
A Police Department spokesman said yesterday that he could not immediately provide information on radio plans.
Robert Lawson, a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said yesterday that the mayor, while visiting Washington last week, stressed to government officials the importance of getting the city its share of homeland security funds. “The mayor appreciates Senator Schumer’s efforts,” Mr. Lawson said.