Roles in Disaster Cause Rift in City
By William K. Rashbaum And Michelle O’donnell, The New York Times
More than two and a half years after the World Trade Center attacks exposed weaknesses in New York City’s emergency response system, the city still lacks what many experts say is the most basic and essential tool for handling disasters: a formal agreement governing which city agency would lead the response at the scene of any catastrophic accident or terrorist strike.
Indeed, documents and interviews show that the dispute over control of such scenes among the city’s main emergency response agencies -- the Police and Fire Departments and the Office of Emergency Management -- remains profound.
An exchange of letters in January between the Police Department and the O.E.M., in fact, shows that the police insist that they should control virtually every major emergency. The police, saying they alone possess the necessary resources and expertise, cite intelligence that they say makes clear “that Al Qaeda and other related terrorist groups are planning to utilize WMD devices to attack New York City.”
Therefore, if a chemical attack occurred in the city’s subways tomorrow, rescuers -- some of the best-trained and equipped in the nation -- would flood the scene and work to save lives. They would be working, however, without an accepted command structure to coordinate the work of more than a dozen city agencies, including not only the Police and Fire Departments, but the Health Department and the Department of Environmental Protection.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is ultimately responsible for producing an accord, is optimistic about recent progress, and does not view the lack of an agreement as grave, according to a spokesman. And top officials in the Police and Fire Departments, who had said they were on the verge of a formal agreement seven months ago, publicly expressed confidence that the problems would be ironed out soon.
The stakes are high. Not only do most experts agree that such a formal command system is critical, but the federal government has said it will withhold tens of millions of dollars next year in homeland security funding if no system is in place by October. On the morning of Sept. 11, the Police and Fire Departments, which have long had a problematic rivalry, barely communicated at the World Trade Center, and each department suffered grievous losses of life.
Interviews with senior officials and the recent exchange of letters suggest that the deep divide persists. They show, for instance, that the Police Department in recent months has made an aggressive push to lay claim to the top job at virtually all scenes, including those where the Fire Department has long been recognized by many as most expert -- from building collapses to hazardous materials incidents.
In addition to terrorist attacks, and plane and train crashes, the Police Department has also said it should be the lead agency at everything from water main breaks and power and phone failures to weather emergencies. Under the police proposal, the Fire Department would be the lead agency only at fires, stuck elevators, rescues in confined spaces and impalements.
The Fire Department maintains that it should serve as the lead agency at explosions, incidents involving hazardous materials, building collapses and plane crashes on land. In short, it claims the prime role in any rescue in which lives are in peril and the highly specialized skills of firefighters are needed, such as working in smoke-filled areas, mitigating chemical contamination and sifting through rubble searching for victims.
The strain and mistrust between the departments exist at a time when each has made major investments in improving its readiness for terror. The Police department has investigators gathering intelligence in several foreign countries including Israel and Indonesia. They are in line to receive state-of-the-art monitors to sniff out biological attacks, and are increasing training. They are helping formulate a range of plans to prepare the city for an assault by terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction.
The Fire Department, for its part, has recently produced a sweeping plan that lays out comprehensive measures to prepare for such an attack. It has recently trained more than 600 firefighters to work with hazardous materials, trained officers to work in management teams for extended rescue operations and will add 25 ambulances to a fleet of 10 that can be used to treat and transport people exposed to radiation or chemical or biological materials.
The Police Department said yesterday that reaching an agreement on the plan or protocol -- called the Citywide Incident Management System -- was delayed in large part because the federal Department of Homeland Security did not complete its own broad national protocols until March 1. The city plan must follow the national model, called the National Incident Management System.
A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg also said the protocols were delayed by the departure in January of the head of the O.E.M., John T. Odermatt, whose agency was writing the plan. His replacement, Joseph F. Bruno, will not start work until later this month.
But the interviews and correspondence from January show that the Police Department has sought to reduce the authority of the Office of Emergency Management. In a Jan. 12 letter to the O.E.M.'s acting commissioner, a senior Police Department official wrote that the O.E.M. should neither have the authority to choose which city agency would take the lead role, nor the authority to resolve interagency disputes.
“This type of authority should be reserved for and exercised only by the mayor,” wrote the official, Assistant Chief Phil T. Pulaski, who is involved in formulating the protocols with Fire Department and O.E.M. officials. “Moreover, it is the position of the NYPD that the coordinating agency should have no operational authority whatsoever.”
In a response, Calvin Drayton, the first deputy commissioner at the O.E.M. who is serving as acting commissioner, cited the City Charter, which states that the O.E.M. is the lead agency in coordinating and moving resources to incidents involving public safety and health, including incidents that may involve acts of terrorism.
“The mayor, of course, has final authority to designate the lead agency,” he wrote. “However, the vast majority of multiagency responses that occur daily in New York City are resolved without the mayor’s personal involvement.”
The mayor, in recent weeks, has appeared to side with the Police Department, seeking to redefine the O.E.M.'s role and suggesting that there was little need for an agency to coordinate the work of the Police and Fire Departments.
“The truth of the matter is they don’t have big coordinating problems,” he said on his weekly WABC radio show. The city, he said, needs more planning from the O.E.M., rather than having the agency respond to events.
In an e-mail message yesterday, the mayor’s spokesman wrote: “Emergency workers from different agencies work alongside each other every day while protecting New Yorkers and this agreement seeks to formalize existing practices as well as establish protocols which take into account the dangerous world we now live in.”
The protocols being drawn up by the O.E.M.Citywide Incident Management System, must conform to the federal model for the city to receive federal Homeland Security grants. Since 1996, the city has had a chart of command designating which agency would take the lead, although the document often failed to prevent jurisdictional clashes.
Under the protocols, the city’s emergency responders would operate at a catastrophe under a unified command. The designated lead agency would oversee the work of other departments, but rescue workers from each agency would answer to their own commanders. Senior officials of each agency would confer at a command post, and major disputes would be settled by the mayor.
One of the central areas of dispute is incidents involving hazardous
materials. Both departments field teams of officers trained in such work and both have recently increased the number trained. But historically, it has been the domain of the Fire Department. It is an area of increasing importance as concern about radiation and chemical and biological weapons has grown.
The Fire Department’s specialized units respond to such incidents. But with the specter of terrorism, the Police Department has argued that any incident -- even those that appear to be accidental -- must be treated as possible acts of terror. Fire Department officials in the past have contended that the Police Department does not have the depth of training, resources or expertise to handle these incidents.
Chief Pulaski, in his Jan. 12 letter, said that what were once unexceptional emergencies, like building collapses or trucks spilling chemicals, should be considered crimes or terrorism until they are “proven not to be.”
He cited a range of intelligence on Al Qaeda’s instructions to terrorists to create improvised weapons of mass destruction by crashing trucks carrying chemicals and using toxic chemicals or radioactive materials. Al Quada also suggested renting apartments in strategically located high-rise buildings and using gas to bring them down, he wrote.
Chief Pulaski also detailed the department’s position on the variety of events in which it said it should serve as the lead agency. Roughly half of his four-page letter was devoted to detailing the department’s training, resources, experience and law enforcement expertise to show why it should be the lead agency for almost every type of emergency, disaster or attack. The lead agency, he said, should be the one that can “manage the entire incident” rather than the “agency with the expertise to resolve one or more specialized aspects of the incident.”
Citing a draft of the federal protocol, he wrote that the Police Department should take the lead at all plane and rail crashes, explosions, incidents involving hazardous materials, blackouts, building collapses, telephone failures, water main breaks and weather emergencies.