Chaotic Efforts May Have Cost Lives, Reports Suggest
by Michael Powell, Washington Post
NEW YORK -- This city’s Fire Department responded in a chaotic and disorganized fashion to last September’s attack on the World Trade Center, as radios failed, orders and warnings were ignored, and chiefs lost track of hundreds of firefighters on the scene, according to two reports released today.
Dispatchers assumed one company was in its firehouse -- until the unit sent a radio message from the 35th floor of World Trade Center One. In another instance, dispatchers learned that the upper floors of the same tower had begun to collapse -- but their computer messages never reached the fire chiefs on the site.
Police and fire chiefs failed to talk to one another throughout that morning, and police officials often reacted to the disaster “on instinct and experience” rather than relying on “a structured set of priorities.”
New York City officials have acknowledged privately for weeks that the fire and police response to the Sept. 11 attacks was a mixture of heroism, confusion and poor communication. But the reports, prepared by management consultant McKinsey & Co. at the city’s request, document the breadth of those problems with dozens of interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of computer records and hours of radio transmissions.
The reports’ findings strongly suggest, without explicitly saying so, that poor training and communications, and a century-old rivalry between the fire and police departments, might have contributed to the deaths of dozens of firefighters and a smaller number of police officers.
One report cites the case of a 911 operator who received a phone call at 9:37 a.m. saying that one of the top floors was collapsing in the South Tower. The operator typed in this message, which made its way to police special operations. But, the report says, no senior fire chief ever learned of this warning.
The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m.
The reports recommended that at future disasters the two departments create integrated operations centers to improve communication.
City officials stressed that the McKinsey reports in no way impugn the courage and heroism of the rescue workers who died that day. These firefighters and police officers undoubtedly helped thousands of office workers escape the towers, they 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,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “It is in that spirit that we present these reports.”
Altogether, 343 firefighters, 37 Port Authority police and 23 NYPD officers died after two hijacked airplanes slammed into the towers.
“These guys were lambs to the slaughter,” said an expert familiar with the report. “The department could not control its own brave men.”
Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, who was appointed last December, took exception to questions about whether deaths could have been avoided.
“It would be irresponsible to say that,” he said. “That some died because of [these problems] is something we don’t know.”
The city’s fire and police departments represent two deeply ingrained cultures that are often on a collision course with each other. The New York Police Department hardly emerges unscathed from these reports -- one found that too many of the department’s top brass placed themselves at risk of death by needlessly running to the site.
The NYPD, the report says, lacked “a clear command structure” at the scene, which led to “inadequate control” of the hundreds of police officers who streamed downtown. And in the days after that, the report found, department leaders lacked the analytic capacity to sift through dozens of rumors of further attacks.
But the Police Department had considerable strengths, not least that its officers have long embraced technological innovation. Over the past two decades, officers have been handsomely outfitted. Police officers on Sept. 11 carried radios that allowed them to hear clear warnings from helicopters that the North Tower was glowing red.
As a result, most of the police officers escaped the North Tower, while many dozens of firefighters died.
“I want to stress that this is not an exercise in Monday morning quarterbacking,” said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who took the helm of the department last January. “Clearly, we have training and management issues.”
The tale of the Fire Department’s response is more depressing. This is a department still grounded in successions of father and son, uncle and cousin. Its esprit de corps is considerable. Leaders rise from the engine houses, often on the basis of displays of raw and brave leadership.
But the McKinsey report took a dim view of the Fire Department leaders, noting that $2 million is needed to train them. Fire chiefs, the report notes, are not “effective managers,” don’t understand their roles and responsibilities, and need to learn how to better command and plan. Even the most senior chiefs enjoy civil service protection.
Managers, the report said, must be “committed to bringing about profound change. They must be capable of leading all personnel by example.”
The department also suffers from a long tradition of resistance to technological innovation -- in the 19th century, the Fire Union fought the move from hand-pulled to horse-pulled engines, and in the 20th century it resisted the change from horse-drawn equipment to fire trucks.
“The Police Department has prided itself on a management capacity,” said Harvey Robins, the city’s former director of operations. “Whereas it was like pulling teeth to get the Fire Department to consider innovation.”
The department on Sept. 11 had a single Hazmat unit. And although department officials purchased high-tech radios in 1997, they had not trained firefighters to use them. As it stands, the Fire Department cannot communicate with firefighters inside office towers or in subway and river tunnels, two structures that are particularly vulnerable to terrorist attack and to catastrophic fires.
The report notes that fire commanders stood in the lobbies of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11 and made decisions in a virtual vacuum. The chiefs were without “reliable intelligence, media reports, aerial video coverage, or verbal reports from helicopters on the condition of the towers and traffic.”
Deployment and the enforcement of line discipline remain problems. As firefighters learned of the disaster on Sept. 11, stations began peppering dispatchers with requests to race to the scene. Four engine houses arrived at the World Trade Center without ever receiving clearance from a dispatcher.
Mitchell L. Moss, director of New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center, said Bloomberg has now obtained a clear outline for reform.
“It’s a story of individual heroism and organizational chaos,” Moss said. “It’s a dramatic call for better training and modern reform of the department.”