IN THIS ISSUE

FIRST FOCUS
4 | Young New Yorkers and Welfare 5 | Foreclosure Crisis Fades to Black & Brown 6 | What Was the Impact of Impact Schools?

Vol. 35, No. 4 September/October 2011

8
Magazine Distribution: For retail and newsstand distribution opportunities, visit www.citylimits.org/distribution or e-mail distribute@citylimits.org. Sponsorship and Advertising: We o er organizations, businesses and agencies advertising and sponsorship opportunities on CityLimits.org and in City Limits magazines print and digital editions. Additional advertising opportunities are available on City Limits Mobile Page, Video Features and E-Newsletters. Visit www.citylimits.org/advertise to download our media kit and rate card or call 212-614-5398. Jobs and Marketplace: Submit job listings, calendar events, marketplace listings and announcements at www.citylimits. org/post. Periodical Postage Paid: New York, NY 10001 City Limits (USPS 498-890) (ISSN: 0199-0330) If the Postal Service alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within a year. Postmaster: Please send address changes to: P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253. Copyright 2011. Printed in Queens, New York City. All rights reserved. No portion or portions of this journal may be reprinted without the express permission of the publishers. City Limits is indexed in the Alternative Press Index and the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and is available on micro lm from ProQuest, Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

THE FEATURE WHY FIREFIGHTERS DIE

And what weve learned about saving them By Jarrett Murphy Photographs by Marc Fader

City Limits is published bi-monthly by the Community Service Society of New York (CSS). For more than 160 years, CSS has been on the cutting edge of public policy innovations to support low-income New Yorkers in their quest to be full participants in the civic life of the nations largest city. City Limits 105 East 22nd Street ird Floor New York, NY 10010 212-614-5397 CityLimits.org features daily news, investigative features and resources in the citys ve boroughs. Letters to the Editor: We welcome letters, articles, press releases, ideas and submissions. Please send them to magazine@citylimits.org. Subscriptions and Customer Service: U.S. subscriptions to City Limits are $15 for one year for the print edition or digital edition. Digital and print single issues are $4.95. To subscribe or renew visit www.citylimits.org/subscribe or contact toll free 1-877-231-7065 or write to City Limits, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253. Contributions: City Limits depends on your support to provide investigative journalism and cover the ve boroughs. Contribute at www.citylimits.org/support or contact 212-614-5398 for development opportunities. For Bulk Magazine Orders: Visit www. citylimits.org/subscribe or contact City Limits subscription customer service at 1-877-231-7065 or write to P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253.

CHAPTERS
10 | The Costliest Lessons
Fire ghter deaths in New York City, 19912011

16 | Do You Have Any of My Men?

Progress and peril in the wake of Sept. 11

28 | This Building Killed One Fireghter and May Save Dozens A er deaths and close calls, getting wise to the wind 34 | When Fire Wins
In re ghters deaths, patterns emerge.

51 | Risks Versus Reward

Decisions in a blink, lives in the balance

SIDEBARS
19 | Buildings Save, Buildings Kill Code changes a er Sept. 11, and more coming up 26 | The New 911
Cost and controversy around emergency calls

42 | The Heart Attack Threat Fire ghters deadliest enemy 52 | Diversity and the Department Lawsuits and slow progress

MORE
60 | Look Back
Remember

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ON THE COVER: The helment of Capt. Vincent Fowler, killed at a June 1999 house re. Photo by Marc Fader.

CITY LIMITS STAFF

Director Mark Anthony Editor in Chief Jarrett Murphy Contributing Editors Patrick Arden, Neil deMause, Jeanmarie Evelly, Marc Fader, Jake Mooney, Malik Singleton, Helen Zelon Advertising Director Allison Tellis-Hinds Social Networking Coordinator Nekoro Gomes Creative Direction Smyrski Creative Proofreader Danial Adkison WHERE WEVE BEEN More than 200 people attended the City Limits and the Museum for the City of New York co-sponsored event: War on Poverty 2.0: The Urban Challenge, presented as part of the ongoing Urban Forum series Power and Politics, New York Style. President Obamas antipoverty initiatives were among the topics discussed. WHAT YOU LIKE The ten most popular topics on our site as of August 4, 2011: 1. Immigration 2. Labor Unions 3. Charter Schools 4. Early Childhood 5. LGBTQ 6. Articial Turf 7. Green 8. Photography 9. Cathleen Black 10. Books Be sure to check out our new City Topics pages for a comprehensive resource of news, archives, events, and research on the people, politics, and issues that matter. Interns Gena Mangiaratti, Leah Robinson omas

e Blind Side
As our nation pays tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and celebrates the rising of the new World Trade Center, Americans will gather this month at memorials, public programs, co ee shops and across online platforms to discuss what this last decade has meant. Reuniting ourselves to commemorate the day and honor our shared values will be a welcomed and healthier moment than this summers heated political rhetoric and constant cycle of news that has been destructive to our nations much needed emotional recovery. As we re ect, we should also celebrate how the months following the attacks ignited a universal goodwill in the hearts of the American people. For a then-healing nation, the things that once divided us were suddenly valued as re ecting the diverse fabrics that compose the American dream. As the smoke cleared, and the human e ects of the tragedy emerged, so did a culture of compassion and cooperative spirit. Volunteering was an act of patriotism. Philanthropy evolved into a shared social responsibility. Despite our identities as political partisans, we all gave our nations leaders a vote of con dence. Over the last tough decade, weve watched new and established organizations, agencies and advocates rede ning and reshaping the thinking toward creating sustainable, safe and sound communities and adapting new technologies to connect citizens, government o cials and causes in ways that have transformed how we converse about the issues that matter to us most. While Sept. 11 is not the sole inspiration, the tragedy did show us, in the most inarguable form, the interconnection between politics, safety, nancial security, health and the constant need for dialogue. At City Limits, we aim to be not just a magazine, but rather a media platform that captures that culture of compassion. We use our journalism to re ect the passion of our 8 million residents and the nations urban agenda. New York City is our focus, but what we do is a global model for engaging underserved communities and underreported voices. With the support from the George Polk Investigative Journalism Fund and Fund for Investigative Journalism, we commemorate Sept. 11 with a look at how re ghting hasand hasntchanged. New York City lost 343 re ghters at the World Trade Center, the largest loss of life for any municipal agency in our nations history. In Jarrett Murphys in-depth report, you will learn the steps taken to improve re safety and understand the challenges faced by the rst responders when tragedies occur. is issue concludes our series of issues that honor our 35th anniversary, but is the starting point for many exciting new projects and initiatives for City Limits over the next few months. is fall, with support from the James L. Knight Foundation and the Brooklyn Community Foundation, we will launch a Brooklyn Bureau. We will collaborate with the Museum for the City of New York to host a series of public programs and work with the CUNY Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies to present a student engagement conference in 2012 on issues of college access and health disparties. City Limits will be a content provider for WNET Channel 13s MetroFocus program and be the featured investigative journalism organization in NBCs new show Prime Suspect. Depend on us to keep you informed and engaged as our city and nation prepares for the future ahead. Sincerely, Mark Anthony Director omas

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WHAT YOU THINK One child to an unwed mother is a mistake, four is a disaster for the mother and the taxpayers. As long as we continue to pay for this type of irresponsible behavior, it will never end.
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CORRECTION: Our July issue con ated the number of households receiving welfare bene ts with the number of people. Fi een years ago, one in seven city residents (not one in three households) received welfare. Today, about 350,000 residents, or one in 23 New Yorkers (not one in nine households) receives welfare.

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Photos by the White House, Marc Fader, Colin Lenton

Why Fireghters Die

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FIRST FOCUS
REPORT: Young NYers Face Higher Barriers to Public Assistance
Its a story thats repeated itself several times now under the Bloomberg administration: A leading New York social services agency issues a report harshly criticizing the administrations welfare policies as inappropriate for many poor New Yorkers, and ine ective at moving people into economic self-su ciency. City o cials respond by insisting that the study is awed, and that the citys Work First model has been a success at connecting low-income New Yorkers with employment. e latest study, Missed Opportunity, was issued jointly last month by the Community Service Society (owner of City Limits) and the Resilience Advocacy Project to investigate how young applicants for public bene ts are handled by the city Human Resources Administration, which manages public bene ts. eir answer: poorly. When young people are really at their lowest point, down on their luck, they seek cash assistance, says CSS youth policy director Lazar Treschan. Yet despite state directives that young people, especially those without high school diplomas, should be o ered educational options, he says, the young people we spoke to told us that just isnt happening. Its not just that theyre not being placed,

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Students at Bronx Community Colleges 2010 graduation. A CSS report contends that young, low-income people who become involved with the public assistance system arent always offered the educational opportunities to which they are legally entitled.

theyre not being encouraged. eyre not even receiving information that education is an option. In fact, there is this byzantine series of procedures that make it impossible for anyone to make it into an education program as their work requirement. Many of the survey responses included familiar complaints about the public bene ts system: HRA Job Center workers who, instead of tailoring referrals for their individual cases, send applicants to one-size- ts-all job readiness programs where they spend full days composing resumes and watching job-training videos. In particular, a number of young

people report that they have been told by HRA workers that theyre not allowed to apply for bene ts until they turn 21a violation of state and federal law. Matthew Brune, HRAs executive deputy commissioner for family independence, counters that drawing any conclusions from a small samplethe study interviewed 100 under-24 New Yorkers whod applied for public bene tsis unwarranted. I think ultimately the concern would be that it still remains a very small sample group, and its not broadly illustrative of what HRA does, and does well, for millions of New Yorkers. Neil deMause

Housing Market Crisis Isnt Over for Borrowers of Color

While the national foreclosure crisis that started in 2007 has receded in New York, it continues to rage throughout many predominantly black and Latino city neighborhoods. Despite a slight dip in the number of properties entering foreclosure citywide at the end of last year, we still see, by historical standards, very elevated levels of foreclosure activity in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods in 2010, said Josiah Madar, a research fellow at NYUs Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

Foreclosure activity remains highly concentrated in southeast Queens, northcentral Brooklyn, and the north shore of Staten Island. According to the Furman Centers State of the City 2010, last year more than 50 percent of properties that were acquired by the foreclosing lender were found in fewer than nine percent of the citys community districts. A rep or t co-authored by the Manhattan-based Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP) this spring found that, between 2008 and 2009, conventional re nance lending decreased by 14 percent in New York Citys neighborhoods of color, while lending in the citys predominantly white neighborhoods increased by more than 110 percent. Di culty re nancing means distressed homeowners of color may be having a harder time holding on to their homes than distressed white homeowners.

Modi cations hard to come by Advocates are currently pursuing several avenues that address the foreclosure fallout. Some look to the recently created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a potential bastion of consumer rights. Although the agency launched July 21, it still lacks a director, under Republican threat to block con rmation until more controls are placed on the agencys powers. Others are monitoring the settlement negotiation on nes and penalties between the top ve mortgage servicers and the 50 state attorneys general. Last fall, New Yorks judiciary became the rst in the country to require that attorneys ling foreclosure actions also submit an a rmation to verify that their clients paperwork is accurate. e measure is intended to prevent the robo-signing of foreclosures that erupted last year. On one hand, the new rule has forced attorneys to review

The Fireghters WhyDeath Focus Dieof the Neighborhood Store First and Life

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 4 34 5

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Outcome of School Violence Crackdown Hard to Detect

Early in the Bloomberg administration, the mayor and then-Chancellor Joel Klein identi ed a list of high-crime schools they called Impact Schools. In partnership with Ray Kelly of the NYPD, the Department of Education targeted the schools improvement by assigning additional school safety o cers and NYPD police o cers to assert and maintain order. We are cracking down on the schools with the worst safety records, the mayor said in early January 2004. ey will be getting more police o cers. Disruptive students will not be tolerated. We have a responsibility to provide an environment free from violence and fear so children can learn. We simply wont allow a few people to destroy the educational opportunities of others. In 2004, the formal NYPD presence in city schools was relatively recenta 1998 memorandum of understanding between Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the NYPD that permitted police in the public schools was quietly renewed by Bloomberg in 2003. Now, with police in the schools for more than a decade, it seems timely to ask what happened to the Impact Schools. Seven years a er the Impact Schools initiative, did the program make schools saferdid it permit more students to learn well, to graduate on time, to succeed in work or college a er high school? Answering those questions proves onerousbecause most of the Impact Schools have been shuttered by the DOE, their school buildings now occupied by numerous small-school organizations. Some Impact Schools got safer and were removed from the list, even as new schools were added. As public records and privacy mandates rightly dont permit tracking the progress (or

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Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, then-Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and current Chancellor Dennis Walcott at a 2006 event announcing a new phase in the Impact Schools program. Photo courtesy City Hall.

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failure) of individual students, determining whether Impact School students have graduated from their phasing-out schools before they closed, transferred to other schools, or le school entirely is near-impossible. The Impact Schools theory was grounded in broken-windows policing, common in many of the citys poorest districts, like the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, East New York and Brownsville. e Giuliani-era urban-crime strategy mandates resolving small issues before they become in amed. Adding extra o cers to Impact Schools meant more rigorous screening at building entries for metal objects, like weapons, belt buckles and cell phones. It meant additional o cers in hallways during passing times, making sure students went to class and stayed safe in lunchrooms and auditoriums. Impact policing placed hundreds of extra adults in school buildings, o en with little training: Safety o cers get 14 weeks at the Police Academy, compared with 6 months training for NYPD cadets. Today, more than 5,000 safety o cers work in the citys public schoolsa force thats greater than the entire police corps of Boston and San Francisco, combined. To date, of nearly 30 Impact Schools listed by the DOE, more than 20 have closed or are in phaseoutcurrent students may graduate, but no new students are permitted to enroll. ree former Impact Schools are alive but on federal life-supportawaiting their share of

$22 million in School Improvement Grants that are targeted to restart the citys weakest schools. Only a handful of Impact Schools are still openincluding one, JFK High School in the Bronx, where 46 percent of students graduate in four years and enrollment has been cut to less than a third of its 2002 census as ve new schools have come to share its building. Long story short, of the targeted Impact Schools, only about 20 percent survived their improvement. Asked about the status of the Impact Schools, DOE o cials said the program was still active, although much smaller than in 2004-07. Currently there are eight campuses that are part of the Impact Schools program, wrote Marge Feinberg of the DOE press o ce. Some schools have cycled o the Impact list, like Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn and Newtown High School in Queens. But most have closed, their buildings repopulated as educational campuses housing up to six schools. So did the program work? at most basic questionwas the outcome worth the e ort?cannot be answered with the statistics and accountability data the DOE prizes. What is certain is that many of the high-crime schools targeted for improvement by DOE no longer exist; whether their eradication quali es as improvement is a matter for ongoing debate. Helon Zelon

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This project was generously supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the George Polk Grants for Investigative Reporting. The latter are supported by the Ford Foundation and administered by Long Island University.

THE FEATURE

Why Firefighters Die

And what we have learned about saving them
By Jarrett Murphy / Photographs by Marc Fader
A photo in the home of late FDNY Capt. Vincent Fowler, who died in 1999. Fowler had written a set of procedures for rehouses to follow when one of their own dies. The rst step was for the men who had survived to call their wives.

Why Fireghters Die

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CHAPTER ONE

The Costliest Lessons

Fire ghter deaths in New York City, 1991-2011
an Buren Street runs three blocks through New Brighton, a few hundred yards from Staten Islands northern shoreline. It is a narrow, leafy street of mixed fortune, with well-tended gardens and rambling wood-framed houses sprinkled among bruised A-frames and yards of weedy neglect. e yellow two-story house at 39 Van Buren Street is the smallest and neatest on its block. A spotless patio and hip-high iron fence separate the sidewalk from a compact front garden of ferns and shrubs under a bay window. A slim cement path runs around the back to a tiny fenced-in backyard. Cheery and quiet, it does not look like the kind of building that would kill a New York City re ghter. It does not seem like the kind of place someone would die to save. But it is. is month, New York City and the world will mark the grim anniversary of an event in which the New York City Fire Department, the largest re service in the U.S., played a heroic and tragic role. e FDNYs 343 deaths on Sept. 11 represent the largest loss of life by any public safety agency in American history. And while just under 3,000 innocents were murdered on 9/11, including many other rst responders, nothing captured the moral imprint of the day quite like the image of hundreds of re ghters making their way up the stairs while everyone else ed. Some re ghters stopped to make a last confession before they began their ascent. Some stayed with injured civilians even when death was certain. at days scenes will never leave us.
www.citylimits.org 10

A November 2008 re in this Staten Island house claimed the life of FDNY Lt. Robert Ryan, Jr.the 11th FDNY death in a re operation since Sept. 11, 2001. Photo by Jarrett Murphy.

Nor should its lessons. Sept. 11 was many thingsa political earthquake, an intelligence debaclebut at its core, it was a re. And so it had lessons to teach about how New York City might ght res like that in the future. Time, however, did not stop on 9/11. e city soon went back to living and working and burning. e FDNY has battled a quarter of a million structural res since the twin towers fell. And it has lost 11 men doing so. One, omas Brick, got lost and died in a furniture warehouse. Another, Richard Sclafani, met his end in a cellar. John Martinson died in an apartment re. e others fell o roofs or leapt from windows, or died in oor collapses or high-rise disasters. Few will remember the anniversaries of these deaths. But in a way, they are just as important as the deaths on Sept. 11, not just to the families who lost husbands or sons but also to the re ghters who, as you read this, are probably pulling up in front of a building somewhere in New York City. Ten years a er Sept. 11 is a good time to revisit what that days very costly lessons were and whether the New York City Fire Department has learned them. But the prospect of another Sept. 11 is as unlikely as it is terrifying. Fires in basements and factories and two-story homes, however, will happen all the time. So its important to also learn the lessons that people like Brick, Sclafani and Martinson paid for with their lives. Since 2006, City Limits has been using the Freedom of Information Law to gather o cial FDNY reports on line-ofduty deaths from 1991 to the present. ese documents and others, along with interviews with current and former FDNY

personnel, re experts and kin of the deceased, point to a set of factors that contributed to those deaths, and the many reports on Sept. 11 detail the lessons that disaster had to teach. FDNY reports and interviews with experts indicate whether the lessons from these many fatalities have led to meaningful change in New York City. Our investigation found: New York City firefighters are better equipped and trained than they were on Sept. 11, and the re department has made enormous e orts to improve planning and procedures although some questions linger about whether New Yorks emergency management strategy is fully prepared for another major cataclysmic emergency. A familiar set of circumstances is found in most other lineof-duty FDNY deaths since 1991. e department has made improvements in several areas where its death investigations showed weaknesses. Some of these innovations took years to deliver, perhaps because of technological obstacles. Other factors that have contributed to firefighter deaths persist. Some may be insoluble. Meanwhile, scal pressures threaten to introduce new dangers by reducing manpower on engine and perhaps ladder companies. New York City has long employed an aggressive approach to ghting res. is o en saves civilian lives and property but also exposes re ghters to greater risks.

A CONTEXT FOR DANGER

Deadly Fires
161 162 173 149 145

Civilian re deaths in New York City, 1993-2010

125 107 112 107 109 98 106 92 94 92

85

78

67

In addition to the 11 New York City re ghters who died ghting res since September 11, three re ghters died of acute medical problems and two FDNY emergency medical services workers also died on the job. Fire ghting is, however, far from the most dangerous job in America. Of all 4,551 people who died while working nationwide in 2009, only 41 were professional re ghters. In New York City alone, 81 construction workers died from 2006 through 2010, compared with nine FDNY members. But re ghting is one of the few jobs in which people die trying to save other people. And while re ghter deaths are fairly rare, they are more common than one might expect, given the sharp decline in res over the past four decades. e rate of res per 1,000 people in the U.S. decreased from 14.9 in 1977 to 4.4 in 2009. e number of re ghter deaths (including volunteers) fell from 157 to 90 per year in that timean impressive change, for sure, but not in line with the fall in res. In the entire U.K. in 2008the last year for which statistics are availablenot a single re ghter died. e year before, six did. More than 236 American re ghters died over that span of time. Across the country, e orts are under way to reduce re ghter deaths. e Department of Homeland Security is funding a program called the Fire ghter Near Miss Reporting System, in which re ghters share near-deadly experiences in the hope of allowing others to avoid close calls. Meanwhile, the National Fallen Fire ghter Foundation is mounting an e ort called Everybody Goes Home that intends to change policies and practices that contribute to death at re scenes. e FDNY has played a role in that national e ort to make re ghting smarter and safer. is March the department hosted re commanders from around the country for a symposium on re ghting tactics at its training academy on Randalls Island, which re ghters call the Rock. Comparing New York City re ghting to that of other American cities is di cult. No city is as vertical as New York, nor as large, nor as appealing a target for terrorists. But a crude look at statistics suggests that New York does not stand out for re ghter safety. Since 1990, Los Angeles has lost 17 re ghters in operations, Chicago 11, Houston seven. Not counting Sept. 11 or deaths from acute medical causes like heart attacks, New York City lost 32 re ghters in that period. One of them was Lt. Robert J. Ryan, Jr. He is the man who died at 39 Van Buren Street.

Another Sept.11 is as terrifying as it is unlikely. Fires in basements and factories and two-story homes, however, will happen all the time. So its important to also learn the lessons that people like Brick, Sclafani and Martinson paid for with their lives.

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

00

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09

10

WHY DID HE DIE?

Source: FDNY. Deaths at the World Trade Center were not considered re deaths. Years 1993-2000 display calendar-year data. Years 2001-2010 reect scal year data.

Sometime around midnight on the Saturday before anksgiving 2008, electrical wiring overheated and

started a smoldering re in the space between the second- oor ceiling and the attic oor at 39 Van Buren Street. A neighbor noticed and roused the residents, according to the report prepared by the FDNY Safety and Inspection Services Command, which investigates re ghter deaths and major injuries. Within 3 minutes, 17 seconds of being dispatched, Engine 155 traveled the seven-tenths of a mile between its rehouse on Brighton Avenue and the house on re. Ryan, Engine 155s o cer or boss, radioed in a 10-75, meaning that there was a working re at the address. He headed into the building with two of his men who carried the hose. Fire could be seen lapping out and up the exterior of the house, but as Ryan climbed the stairs to the second oor and then the attic, he saw no ames. Members of a ladder company, using a special thermal-imaging camera, saw that heat was concentrated in one corner of the attic, so they ripped open a hole in the wall to expose re and smoke. e attic quickly got very hot and smoky. Ryan spoke through his breathing mask into the radio, telling Engine 155s pump operator, Give us water. Another ladder company arrived and started to rip open the walls and ceiling on the second oor. Ryan called the battalion chief, who was standing outside, running the operation. Were trying to open up the walls, he said. Fires got up in the walls. A second engine company came into the house and

12

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began assisting Ryans team with its hose, which was spraying into the attic. Sometime in the next minute, something knocked Ryans helmet off. I lost my helmet, one of the ladder company members in the attic heard him say. e smoke and heat conditions increased dramatically in the attic, the FDNY report reads. ere was so much smoke it would have been hard to nd a helmet on the ground. Lieutenant Ryan continued to operate without the thermal protection provided by a donned re helmet, the report reads. He made the decision to back the hoseline out of the attic. Indeed, now apparently not wearing his breathing mask, Ryan called into the radio, Back out. Back out. e two men under Ryans command edged their way back to the attic stairs to get out. Fire ghters began banging into one another on and near the stairs. Weve got a lot of guys on the second oor, if you could start pulling them down, one ladder company o cer radioed the chief. Ryan and two ladder company re ghters were still in the attic. Im burning up, Ryan told one companion. Where are the stairs? A ladder re ghter spoke into his radio. Urgent, urgent, urgentwe have to back out of this room. Crawling, he guided Ryan to the stairs. Ryan passed out. e ladder re ghter called out for help. Ryans gear got caught on a banister; it took three men to free him and carry him down to the landing. He had no pulse. A rescue team brought a stretcher up to where Ryan lay. As Ryan was being tended to on the second- oor landing, an emergency medical services ambulance pulled up to the scene. Its occupants began backing their rig down the street, away from the re. As a group of re ghters bore Ryan down to the street, where some began CPR, a re dispatcher called for EMS to send help faster. A minute and a half later, the dispatcher repeated that call. e EMS personnel in the ambulance down the street put on their gear and rolled their stretcher toward the house. A neighbor told them that a re ghter was in distress. Finally, ve minutes a er Ryan had been removed from the house, EMS personnel located him and began assisting with his treatment. Twelve minutes later, Ryan was in the back of an ambulance heading toward the hospital. e re at 39 Van Buren Street was declared under control at 1:31 a.m. At around the same time, Robert Ryan was pronounced dead at Richmond University Medical Center. Several re ghters did their jobs very well the night Ryan perished, according to the o cial FDNY report. His engine chau eur found a way to hook up to a hydrant despite an illegally parked car. Fire ghters outside the

Several reghters did their jobs very well the night Ryan perished. Still, the FDNYs report raised disturbing questions. For one, Ryans 45-minute air tank ran out in six or seven minutes.

building gave reliable reports on re conditions. e men who brought Ryan out of the attic moved swi ly. Still, the FDNYs report raised disturbing questions. Ryan was wearing a standard Scott air tank with a 45-minute rating. He was in the attic for no more than seven minutes. Yet when he was removed, there was no air le in his tank. It is not clear why this problem, which was foreshadowed in several other re fatalities, occurred. e crowding on the stairs may have complicated the evacuation of the attic. And all told, it took 23 minutes to get Ryan from the attic to a hospital two miles away. Strongly suggesting that the ambulance crews delay was crucial, the o cial FDNY report into Ryans death called for a new policy under which emergency medical services join the FDNY in an a er-action investigation when a re ghter dies. But the report focused on Ryans decision to stay in the attic without his helmet on and eventually with his breathing mask o . e [self-contained breathing apparatus] facepiece must be continuously donned when in an IDLH [immediately dangerous to life or health atmosphere]. No member should enter or operate in an IDLH without a helmet properly secured by a chin strap. Its entirely possible that Ryan contributed to his own death. But from the ambulance delays to the crowded stairs to the decision to have re ghters work in the attic, its reasonable to wonder if other factors contributed to his death. is is a natural question whenever a person dies in service to his city, whether its one man in an attic, two men in a doomed skyscraper or 343 people in two of the tallest buildings in the world.

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CHAPTER TWO

Do You Have Any Of My Men?

Progress and peril in the wake of Sept. 11
s amazing as it seems now, there was resistance to investigating Sept. 11. Twenty-two House Republicans voted against authorizing a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). President George W. Bush resisted the creation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a.k.a. the 9/11 commission. Mayor Michael Bloomberg took no questions from the 9/11 commission when it came to New York to investigate the citys response, and for a time he blocked the release of o cial records to the NIST investigators and the 9/11 commission, because the city was ghting an ultimately successful New York Times lawsuit to make the records public. Meanwhile, neither the FDNYs Safety Battalion nor the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which routinely probe re ghter deaths, investigated the World Trade Center fatalities. At the time, I just think because of the magnitude of the event, nothing was done, says Tim Merinar, who leads NIOSHs re ghter fatality investigations. I dont really think any organization did a true fatality investigation of the incident. (In fairness, the
Remembering the disaster at Tiles for America.

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scale of the losses would have made such investigations, which detail the precise circumstances of each death, di cult to complete.) Despite these obstacles, three reportsthe NIST study, the 9/11 commission investigation and an FDNY-authorized report by the consultant McKinsey & Co.managed to, very delicately, spell out Sept. 11s painful lessons for the city and its re department. Death in a disaster usually has multiple causes. You could talk about the Titanic and focus on the iceberg, not the lifeboats. You could discuss Hurricane Katrina and omit any mention of the levees. You could blame the Hindenburg only on static electricity. But none of these would give a full accounting of why people ended up injured or dead. Sept. 11 would never have happened if terrorists hadnt decided to kill Americans. But it might have taken a lower toll on the re department if problems with communications and personnel had been averted. Fighting res in high-rise buildings is very di erent from battling blazes in shorter structures. Fire ghters cant leave a tool in their truck and run down to get it or easily step outside for a new tank of air. Most important, they usually have to use a water READ THE REPORTS system built into the highrise building to put out the Links to reports by NIST, McKinsey and the 9/11 Commission. blaze. Even when that water www.citylimits.org/re is available, some high-rise res are simply too large to put out. To extinguish even a aming half- oor of the WTC would have required, by NISTs calculations, 1,250 gallons of water a minute, a deluge that might take 10 engine companies to provide. Rescuing people in high-rise buildings is complicated too. e time it takes a person wearing at least 50 pounds of gear to climb dozens of ights of stairs could be longer than the time a civilian can survive trapped amid toxic smoke. All these challenges were exacerbated on Sept. 11. Not only were multiple, huge oor areas in ame, the res were also whipped by wind pouring in through the buildings shattered sides. e standpipes in both buildings were believed to have been severed by the aircra s impact, meaning no water could reach the upper oors. e elevators werewith a single exception in each towerrendered immobile, robbing re ghters of a method for reaching the re faster. So FDNY commanders decided early on at the World Trade Center that they would mount a rescue operation, not a re ghting one. At best it would take hours to

WHAT WAS THE MISSION?

establish meaningful re ghting operations on the upper oors of the buildings, the NIST report found. It was likely that many of the occupants trapped at or above the impact zone would die before help could get to them. Despite this decision, the NIST report and individual re ghters oral histories reveal that some re companies were ordered to head to the impact zone and set up a post for what NIST dubbed rescue and re ghting operations. at report found that as the senior command level strategies were communicated to the lower levels, the concepts appeared to take hold at a slower pace at the next level down. Some re ghters at the company level were disturbed by the operations order that signaled a change toward assisting with the evacuation. ey wanted to go up and put the re out. In the FDNYs oral histories, a number of re ghters recalled being told to prepare to extinguish the blaze, or being given vague orders to simply head upstairs. Doing so was extremely di cult. One unit took an hour to reach the 31st oor. Many re ghters went 10 or 12 oors, rested, climbed ve or six more, took another blow, then scaled three or four additional ights. Several re ghters reported chest pains. Large groups of exhausted FDNY men were seen resting in a north-tower elevator lobby just before the building came down. Despite the confusion and physical strain, re ghters doubtless saved lives by helping people evacuate. But late-arriving re companies found few civilians le in the building.

Buildings Save, Buildings Kill

Code changes after Sept. 11, and more coming up
requirements during the time when the WTC was being designed hadnt permitted them to slash the number of stairwells from the six that would have been required. The detailed NIST investigation laid bare the need for changes in regulation, and many modications have been incorporated into the three full revisions of the national-model International Building Code since the attacks. But the real-estate lobby opposed some of the improvements that safety advocates wanted, with the Building Owners and Managers Association ghting to make sure the NIST recommendations are not used as justication for introducing unnecessary new requirements in state and local building codes. In 2008, New York City for the rst time adopted a model building code. This included sweeping changes, like requiring wider stairs, stronger stairwells and built-in voice communication systems for reghters in high rises. Most of these rules apply only to new buildings. There is a rule that all buildings 100 feet or tallernew or existingmust install sprinklers, but the deadline isnt until 2019. We wanted seven years. The opposition got it to 2019, says Jack Murphy, a retired New Jersey re chief and national code expert. He says the push for better sprinkler coverage dates from the days when the WTC was built. Its 50 years weve been talking about this. New York Citys code revision was based on the 2003 International Code Council model code. Since then, the code has been revised twice, with a third revision due out in 2012. So New York is preparing to update its own code once again. Some big-ticket items

The Freedom Tower takes shape at Ground Zero. Because it is on territory controlled by the Port Authority, the building is not subject to the citys construction and re codes although the Port has said it will exceed those requirements. Photo by Matthew Bisanz.

KEEPING TRACK OF A TRAGEDY

According to NIST, the re departments personneltracking system generally worked well for the rst 30 minutes but then became overwhelmed with the large number of units and personnel arriving at the scene. Sixty-one percent of the citys engine companies, 43 percent of ladder units and nearly half of all chiefs were dispatched to the World Trade Center, but all the incident commanders had to track them on was a suitcase-size command board that used a whiteboard and magnets to keep sense of who was being sent where. eres a misconception that dozens of FDNY units deployed to the WTC on their own. In fact, only four did. But according to the 9-11 Commission, more re units were dispatched to the scene than commanders asked for. Some re trucks and engines rode heavy, with re ghters who were going o duty leaping aboard to join the shi that had just come in. Several re ghters arrived on the scene as individuals, asking to help. McKinsey found that as these units approached the area, many failed to report to the staging areas and instead proceeded directly to the tower lobbies or other parts of the incident area. As a result, senior chiefs could not

The terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11 committed one, purely inadvertent act of charity: They struck early. By plowing American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower at 8:46 a.m., they hit a building that held about 8,900 people as opposed to the 19,800 people who might have been inside later in the day. And thanks to the 16 minutes that elapsed between the rst impact and the strike on the south tower, many of the 8,500 people who were in the second building gained a precious few minutes head start on their journey to safety. Had both buildings been fully occupied, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) believes that 14,000 people might have died in the collapses. Timing was just one of the variables in play. Life and death hinged on where a person was, where the plane hit and how the twin towers had been

designed three decades earlier. Flight 11 slammed into the part of 1 WTC where the three exit stairwells were bunched closest together. All 1,393 people trapped above the impact died. United Flight 175, on the other hand, cut 2 WTC at a point where the stairwells were farthest apartleaving one path to safety open for a few minutes. At least 18 people in the south tower made it from above the impact zone to safety. Some 619 were trapped above and died. Relatively few people who were below the oors of impact perished: about 107 in the north tower and a mere 11 in the south tower. Its eerie to imagine how many more might have lived if the designers of the towers had obeyed the citys building code and designed the buildings with four stairwells as opposed to three or if a loosening of New Yorks building

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could be on the table. One is the question of whether all new one- and two-family homes should have sprinklers; the new International Residential Code says they should. FDNY, meanwhile, is interested in having the code address all the new uses of New Yorks roofsfor cellular phone equipment, plants, solar panels, decks and cocktail hours. Another looming topic is whether building owners should be permitted or even required to provide special elevators for re evacuations. For years, the message drilled into building occupants has been to never, ever use elevators in the event of a re, because you could get trapped inside. But Sept. 11 has changed the thinking about high-rise emergencies, introducing the possibility Sept. 11 has of full-building evacuations changed the and highlighting the fact that some people are not physithinking about cally capable of walking high-rise many ights of stairs. emergencies, So-called occupant evacintroducing uation elevators offer a the possibility potential solution to those of full-building problems. And since buildevacuations and ings have to have elevators anyway, they give builders highlighting a way to provide for egress the fact that some people are without building one of those annoyingly unrentable not physically stairwells. capable of An OEE elevator would walking many have to be specially ights of stairs. designed to be protected from smokewhich could kill its occupantsand water, which might render it inoperable. And there are tricky questions about how OEE elevators should operate. Presumably, they would be programmed to scoop people from the re oor and the two oors above and below. But some insist on giving humans the ability to override that program. If, for instance, there are 100 kindergartners on the top oor, it might make sense for the elevator to get them rst, then deal with the oors nearest the re. There are some things computers do well, says Norman Groner, an authority on building evacuation. When it comes to situational awarenessunderstanding an event and what it meanspeople do that well. Computers are terrible at it. The current IBC national model code calls for OEE elevators (or an extra stairwell) in new buildings 420 feet and higher. Midsize buildings are exempted. New York Citys code already allows elevator use in non-re emergencies, Groner says. The question is whether New York will soon allowor mandateelevator usage in res as well.

accurately track the whereabouts of all units. When the second plane hit, a second h alarmthe highest in the departments normal operational battle planwas sounded. But, as had been pointed out a er the 1993 bombing but never corrected, there was no procedure in place for an alarm greater than h. And it meant that units that were totally unfamiliar with the WTC were showing up at the scene, sometimes in the wrong place. Some re ghters whod been assigned to the south tower showed up at the north tower instead, leading the south towers re commander to call for more men. Because some units did not stage and chiefs were unsure of their location, additional units, that might not have been required at that time, were deployed to the incident, McKinsey continued. If units had staged according to protocol, other units that were dispatched to the World Trade Center might have been kept instead in the citywide pool. And, one might speculate, more re ghters would have survived.

COMMUNICATIONS PROBLEMS

No part of the emergency response garnered more attention than the radios that FDNY personnel were usingthey were, a er all, the same devices that had performed so poorly at the 1993 Trade Center incident. A belated e ort to replace them had been scuttled earlier in 2001 when a poorly tested replacement radio failed at one re. NIST found that a third to a half of all emergency responders radio transmissions at the WTC incident were unreadable or incomplete. But the exact impact of radio problems is not a simple thing to gauge. All handheld radios are susceptible to problems in high-rise buildings because their low wattage generates signals that are o en too weak to travel multiple oors. A er 1993 the FDNY had installed a repeatera device that ampli es and retransmits radio messagesfor both towers on the roof of 5 WTC. On 9/11, re ghters in the south tower apparently used their repeater. Fire ghters in the north tower didnt, because chiefs there erroneously thought that repeater was broken. But it might not have mattered. When the south tower fell, the repeater was wiped out. If re ghters in the north tower had been relying on the repeater, their communications might have gone dark once the other tower fell. More important than the brand of radio or the use of the repeater might have been the sheer number of reghters trying to talk on one channel, which was simply overloaded. In addition, despite recommendations a er the 1993 bombing and subsequent re ghter fatalities that such a device be developed, chiefs didnt have a special tone alert to help in ordering the evacuation of the north tower a er the south tower collapsed. (Despite

The New York City Fire Department

On Aug. 1, 1865, a paid professional re department replaced a mostly volunteer force in providing re protection to New York City. Today, just under 11,000 uniformed reghters and re ofcers serve the ve boroughs. The FDNY is headed by a civilian commissioner, Salvatore Cassano. Operational control is vested in the chief of department, Edward Kilduff. There are 14 staff chiefs who each oversee a portfolio, including training, communications and ve prevention. Other top chiefs command the re personnel in a particular borough. A special operations command includes the chiefs who lead the rescue, marine and hazardous-materials divisions. The department splits the city geographically into nine divisions, each headed by a deputy chief. Every division contains several battalions overseen by battalion chiefs; there are 52 battalions in the city. A battalion comprises several engine companies and ladder companies. A re company has a captain in charge and a group of lieutenants who help the captain administer the unit. On a particular shift, a captain or a lieutenant might command the four or ve reghters who make up a company. There are 218 rehouses in New York, and most have an engine and a ladder company.

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this, the 9/11 commission concluded that at least 24 of the at most 32 re units known to be working in the north tower heard the evacuation order.) And while having the ability to communicate is important, having good information to share is vital. e reports on 9/11 indicate that some re commanders inside the towers had little idea what was going on outside, while re leaders outside the buildings had no inkling of what NYPD helicopters were reporting to police commanders. is situation worsened exponentially when the rst building came down, wiping out much of the FDNY command post, which had been set up within the collapse zone of the buildings. is loss of human life and the capital assets makes it imperative that emergency operations protocols for tall buildings be critically reassessed, NIST concluded.

A DECADE OF REPAIR

In earlier days, New York re ghters resisted the move from a volunteer department to a paid one, then from hand-drawn re apparatuses to horse-drawn engines and nally from horses to trucks. When blacks and women sought to join the department, there was a new generation of resistance. More recently, McKinsey noted in its report, the FDNY had considered several changes that would have made a di erence on 9/11 new radios, a re operations center, retraining and even sanctioning units that failed to deploy correctlybut the department hadnt followed through. Paradoxically, even while stubbornly resisting some changes, the FDNY has throughout its history spearheaded others, like pushing for safer tenement construction and, a er the Triangle Shirtwaist factory re, demanding stricter re regulations for businesses. Nicholas Scoppetta, who led the re department from 2002 through 2009, believes this second side of the FDNY is what it has shown since Sept. 11. Its an entirely di erent department, he says of the FDNY since 9/11. e equipment is improved. e tactics are improved. Scoppetta is proud that under his leadership, the FDNY achieved the fastest response time in history: 4:01. ats astonishing. Almost before you put down the phone, the trucks were arriving, as well as the lowest number of civilian fatalities in any eight-year period of the department. Beyond the 343 people (boasting a combined 4,400 years of experience) who were killed on 9/11, the FDNY soon lost hundreds more who were forced out by injury or illness or who decidedperhaps encouraged by their familiesto retire. e department decided to make up for lost experience with new training. It expanded the academy for new re ghters from 13 weeks to 23 weeks, instituted a Fire O cers Management Institute and created new training programs for battalion and

deputy chiefsthe top two civil service ranks in the department. Every member of the department received training in the national incident command system, or ICS, an emergency leadership matrix geared to handling events like Sept. 11; o cers have received intermediate and, in some cases, advanced training in ICS. On Randalls Island, the department built a new, $4.2 million high-rise simulator and, thanks to a grant from the Leary Fire ghter Foundation, created two special training rooms to show new re ghters the subtle, lifesaving warning signs that a room is about to ash overa terrifying phenomenon in which a room becomes so superheated that its contents simultaneously burst into ames, creating a reball that can kill in seconds e training is unbelievable, says Jim Ellson, a retired re captain who was once the executive o cer at FDNYs special operations command and now consults on emergency preparedness. eres no comparison. eyre light-years ahead. Its constant training. FDNYs Fire Department Operations Center, complete with live video feeds from police helicopters and computerized deployment systems, was launched in 2006. A er replacing in short order the 91 pieces of apparatus that were destroyed in the collapses, the FDNY added to its number of hazardous-material tactical, or haztac, ambulances (which specialize in handling emergencies involving toxins), elite-trained ladder companies, and reboats. e FDNY also re-evaluated its procedures for roof rescues, which would not have been feasible on Sept. 11 but mightas a last resortcome into play in a future disaster. e FDNY modernized and automated its recall system, which brings in o -duty re ghters to help in major emergencies, while also establishing formal mutual-aid arrangements in which towns outside the ve boroughs can supplement FDNY resources in the city, or vice versa. A newly invigorated planning unit was set up to develop strategies for di erent WMD attacks. Sixty- ve key targets in the city were assessed for risk and vulnerability. It took more than ve years, but in 2007 the FDNY released a comprehensive terrorism and disaster planning strategy to avoid another Sept. 11. Capt. Alexander Hagan, the head of the Uniformed Fire O cers Association, says it was a herculean e ort to rebuild the re department. It was not an easy period. It was a daunting task, and it really wasit was dangerous, he recalls. e expansion of the re academy to 23 weeks did not last long; budget pressure soon forced the city to scale it back to 18 weeks. But that was still ve weeks longer than before. ey increased the level and intensity of training, Hagan says. ey brought training to a place it had never been before in a re department that trained a lot.

Opposite: Remembering the losses at the Engine 4/Ladder 15 rehouse on Manhattans South Street.

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In 2007, Scoppetta wrote in the preface to the FDNYs strategic plan: e past two years are proof that strategic management has a tremendously positive impact on both our operational and organizational development. e Department has made great strides in the past two years to enhance its preparedness and e ectiveness. Scoppetta added, ere is much more to do. Critics still have their doubts about whether police and re commanders are really better positioned to cooperate during a major emergency. NYPD and FDNY commanders now have radios on which they can talk to one another. e question is whether they will use the special cross-agency channels when the time comes. And the Bloomberg administration outraged re department leaders when it created the Citywide Incident Management System, which, instead of laying out a clear hierarchy, split hairs on the question of who would command during a hazardous-materials incident. Peter Hayden, FDNYs second post-9/11 chief of department, was driven from o ce a er publicly protesting the move to put cops in charge of hazmat incidents whenever terrorism is suspecteda policy that set New York apart from other cities and the national incident management model that post-September 11 reviews had insisted New York adopt. Doubts of a di erent kind emerged a er a re broke out in the summer of 2007 at a building across the street from where the towers had fallen.

A HARSH TEST

Twenty-three minutes a er the rst re companies pulled up to the burning, half-deconstructed Deutsche Bank building on Aug. 18, 2007, Assistant Chief omas Galvin arrived to take command. First he had to nd the command post. He contacted the incident commander, a battalion chief who was acting out of title as a higher-ranking division chief (and whose name we dont know): GALVIN: Hey Steve, where are you setting this up cause theres just a little bit of confusion on how you want us to get in. Where do you want us to come in at? COMMANDER: If we could get a company to force that, ah, plywood right behind Ladder 10s apparatus. We can get access to where we want to set up the, ah, operations, ah, the command post. GALVIN: Steve, we have no idea what you are talking about. Were a little confused right now. Galvin eventually found the post. But within a few minutes, there were more signs of trouble. A re ghter on one of the upper oors of the building radioed, Be advised that we have no water in the lines up here yet. So keep a good distance back. Its gonna be a little while before we get good water. In fact, it would be 67 minutes from the time the rst companies arrived at the building and the moment water nally

began owing into re ghters hoses. By days end thered be at least 10 separate Mayday calls and several more urgenturgent-urgent transmissions as the re roared from the 17th oor up to the 23rd and top oor and down to 16, 15, 14the oors where re ghters were stagingblanketing the air with thick smoke, separating men from their units and blinding them as their oxygen supplies diminished. At one point in the chaos, a company o cer asked into his radio, Do you have any of my men? Most of the re ghters made it out, some by leaping out onto sca olding that jacketed the building. But Fire ghters Robert Beddia and Joseph Gra agnino died of smoke inhalation. One hundred other re ghters were injured. e issue of who was to blame for the Deutsche Bank disaster is well-trodden territory. is summers failed prosecution of three construction supervisors pinned the deaths on the decision to cut a pipe, the standpipe, that should have provided water to re ghters on the upper oors. But according to then-Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau, the Bloomberg administration avoided being indicted in the deaths only because of its status as a government entity, which gives it sovereign immunity. Reports by Morganthaus o ce and the Department of Investigation found that FDNY o cers had failed in their responsibility to inspect the building and plan how to ght a re there. On at least ve occasions, subordinate re chiefs tried to get their superiors to pay attention to the unique risks of the Deutsche Bank building, but little action was taken. Morganthaus report, for instance, says that in February 2005, a memo was written by a Hazmat Battalion Chief and forwarded to the then-Chief of Operations containing recommendations for an emergency re ghting operation plan for the building. However, the Chief of Operations neither approved nor endorsed the recommendations; nor did he distribute them to the rst-due units, the [nearby] 10/10 Firehouse, or the Battalion, Division, Special Operations Command or the Manhattan Borough Command. e DAs report does not name current FDNY commissioner Salvatore Cassano, but he was the chief of operations in February of 2005. e DA con rmed that re ghters at the local house didnt even have the right protective equipment to conduct the inspections they were supposed to do every 15 days. In an exceedingly rare move during the 2009 campaign season, the FDNY publicly reprimanded seven o cers (Cassano not among them) for failing in their duty to inspect the building. But six of those seven o cers appear to have remained on the FDNY payroll at least into 2010. Scoppetta also came in for some blame, with the New York Post campaigning for his resignation. e former commissioner attributes the tabloid criticism he faced to a misunderstanding of his role, in which he did not have control of day-to-day operations. Itd be very unusual for a commissioner to be involved in supervising the inspections of a particular building, he tells City Limits.

BEYOND THE INSPECTIONS

What has gotten less ink than the standpipe and the inspections is the fact that the FDNY response to the Deutsche Bank building on the day of the re su ered from some of the same problems that exacerbated the toll on Sept. 11. eres no denying that the Deutsche Bank building, which was being simultaneously decontaminated and dismantled, was dangerous. It had a severed standpipe, heavy barricades between oors that served to trap re ghters and even banks of industrial fans that could not be shut o , adding noise and mechanized wind to an already treacherous operation. But these obstacles werent the only problems on Aug. 18, 2007. e FDNYs o cial investigation indicates that because commanders waited until too late to set up a separate command channel, the tactical radio channel was overwhelmed. Some of the many Maydays given werent heard or acknowledged by other re ghtersapparently, Beddia and Gra agnino both gave Maydays, but they did not come up on the audio recording of the event. Commanders never said which of the three engine companies that had been dispatched to the upper oors was supposed to be in charge of getting water on the blaze. Windows were broken to vent the re in a manner contrary to procedure. Fire ghters either couldnt or didnt leave the area of danger when their air canisters ran low. e FDNYs report recommends, among dozens of suggestions, that the department develop policies on alternative ways to get water to a high-rise re when the standpipe is unusable. But a separate investigation by NIOSH goes even further in hinting that FDNY re ghting strategy was either not followed at the Deutsche Bank disaster or is in need of revision given what occurred there. It calls for the FDNY to review and follow existing standard operating procedures on high-rise re ghting to ensure that re ghters are not operating in hazardous areas without the protection of a charged hoseline and to develop and enforce risk management plans, policies, and standard operating guidelines for risk management during complex high-rise operations. In other words, the Deutsche Bank response may have su ered not just from water problems, but also from troubling tactical choices. Galvin, the high-ranking chief who eventually took charge of the operation, himself seemed concerned about the way the re response was being run, barking into the radio at one point, Do we have a roll call nished up there? I do not give a shit about the building. I give a shit about the guys, and later, Lets get everybody below this fucking re for a change. One would need a lot of chutzpah to question the decisions made in the heat of the moment by men with

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decades of re ghting experience. But some wonder why FDNY commanders kept shuttling men into a burning building where there were no civilians to save and no water to put the blaze out. Christopher Naum, the head of training at the Command Institute in Washington, D.C., has written that re suppression operations in buildings during construction, alterations, deconstruction, demolition and renovations present signi cant risks and consequences that require a methodical and conservative approach towards incident stabilization and mitigation. He adds: You cannot implement conventional tactical operations in these structures. Doing so jeopardizes all operating personnel and creates unbalanced risk management pro les that are typically not favorable to the safety and wellbeing of re ghters. Vincent Dunn, however, does not believe there were command errors at the Deutsche Bank building. e strategy for high-rise re is to send a blitz attack during the initial stage to quell a re, says the veteran re chief. e Deutsche Bank building re was a one in a millionstandpipe shut o and stairs blocked. Like 9/11, this was not a strategy problem. It was a building problem.

THE TRIALS OF TRACKING

As the situation as the Deutsche Bank re grew tense,

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A New 911

Cost and controversy around emergency calls

On Sept. 11, the 911 emergency call system was overwhelmed and some callers received bad advice. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

On an average day, New York Citys 911 system receives 33,000 calls. On Sept. 11, 2001, it logged more than 50,000, according to former Mayor Giulianis testimony to the 9-11 Commission. These included calls from people inside the twin towers asking for instructions on whether to stay or leave or whether to head up or down. In at least a few cases, 911 operators gave the wrong advice. Meanwhile, re dispatchers went beyond protocol in the number of units they assigned to the disaster. And those problems, experts later noted, paled in comparison to what would have befallen the city if the 911 system itself had been targeted by terrorists. Taken together, these concerns led the Bloomberg administration to undertake a four-pronged emergency communications transformation program. This included grouping all police, re and ambulance dispatchers at one Public Safety Answering Center

(or PSAC) at MetroTech in Brooklyn, creating a backup 911 center (PSAC II) in the Bronx and getting all dispatchers onto a unied dispatch system. The plan also called for implementing unied call taking. Previously, a caller to 911 spoke to a police operator and then, in the case of a re, talked to a re dispatcher. This second conversation consisted of three questions: Whats your address? Whats on re? Whats your phone number? Fifteen seconds after that, re apparatus was out, one re dispatcher says. But the Bloomberg administration considered that a 1960s-era system under which both police and re call takers separately and redundantly interviewed callers, wasting valuable seconds. Under the new unied call taking, the police operator takes all the information and relays it electronically to re dispatchers. The FDNY soon said the system, introduced in May 2009,

reduced response times. But there were glitches. Police operators unfamiliar with getting the information needed for res made mistakes. The administration moved to address the problem by having re dispatchers listen in when 911 operators received a re call. But reghters say they still regularly get address information that is vague or wrong. According to one contributor on the FDNY Rant website, when he called in a car re on the Harlem River Drive at 138th Street recently, the operator asked what borough he was in. Then she asked for an address. Again I told her it was about 138th Street, just west of the Harlem River Drive. Next question was West or East 138th? New technology often causes grumbling, and the fire dispatcher we talked to acknowledged that some of the resistance to the new system can be chalked up to tension between re dispatchers, who tend to be white men, and 911 operators who are mostly black women. The FDNY points to response times that, since the system was implemented, have dropped to their lowest levels ever, but opponents say FDNY response times dont capture the time callers spend on the phone before theyre transferred to re dispatchers. The rest of the transformation plan also hit snags. PSAC I exists, but not all personnel have been moved there yet. After encountering community opposition to its height and proposed location off Pelham Parkway, PSAC II is now under construction, but the price of its technology contract ballooned to from $380 million to $666 million before being restructured last year under pressure from City Comptroller John Liu.

commanders ordered roll calls to see which members werent accounted for. Not only did this prove hard to accomplish on the overcrowded radio channel, but the roster of companies initially read o by chiefs also didnt even include the unit, Engine 24, that the dead men were in, and there was constantly confusion about which oor di erent units were on, who was in the building and who was down below. ismore than anything else about the Deutsche Bank reechoed 9/11 and the overwhelmed command board at the World Trade Center. As the NIST report on the WTC pointed out, tracking re ghters is an issue that has been studied by the emergency responder community for many years. It added, Unfortunately, failures of accountability on the re ground have o en been associated with the injury or death of re ghters. Indeed, problems with keeping re companies together and tracking personnel at a re scene haveaccording to investigations by FDNY or NIOSH factored into at least seven other FDNY deaths since 1991. e McKinsey report, which the FDNY commissioned, called for the department to develop better technology for tracking re ghters. By mid-2002, Motorola was rolling out a re ground accountability tool. e Tulsa, Okla., re department was beta testing that system by 2003. Departments as small as the Ponderosa Volunteer Fire Department in Houston have implemented such a system. e FDNY, however, facing unique needs as the largest and most vertically oriented department in the country, wanted to develop its own system through a partnership with outside techies. Its 2004 strategic plan said that by the end of that year, electronic wireless command post boards, using personal computers that can graphically display the locations of unit deployments, will improve on-scene incident management. When that deadline passed, the department said it would deploy such a system in 2007. Its only now that the FDNY is deploying its electronic re ground accountability system, or EFAS, which keeps track of who is issuing a mayday. e electronic command post is close to being unveiled. NIOSH investigator Tim Merinar says tracking re ghters is an issue all across the re service all across the country. He adds, Because of limitations with the technology, theres still not a real good solution to that problem. Perhaps the FDNYs caution in embracing such a system will help it avoid those technological pitfalls. But the human factor still concerns Steve Mormino, a retired FDNY lieutenant who runs the Fire ghter Near Miss Reporting System. I think that [EFAS] is a positive development, but its not a 100 percent cure-all. It might give you a bit more information, especially when things go crazy, like when you have a collapse, he says. Like anything else, you have to be real careful. Too much information can be just as dangerous as not enough information. In the wake of the Deutsche Bank disaster, the FDNY increased the amount of time each week that a re company

Unfortunately, failures of accountability on the re ground have often been associated with the injury or death of reghters.

does inspections. And it developed new policies for what to do when re o cers run out of air and must leave, and are faced with either leaving their company leaderless or taking everyone under their command out with them; now, they take everyone out.

A DAY NO ONE DIED

For every re in which something goes terribly wrong, as it did at Deutsche Bank, there are hundreds where most things go mostly right. ese success stories are o en retold in the FDNYs internal magazine, With New York Fire ghters, or WNYF, which since 1940 has allowed re commanders to share with other FDNY personnel their lessons learned. One recent issue detailed the response to a re in Woodhaven, Queens, in early 2009 in which wind gusting to 55 mph pumped re through a common cocklo (or void) that ran through 20 wood-framed buildingsone of which, inconveniently, held more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition that began exploding when the ames hit. Following prescribed incident command system procedure, the chief in charge set up separate radio channels to keep communications owing and delegated the control of certain aspects of ghting the re to other chiefs: One oversaw the ght on one ank of the re; another chief took the other side; others were responsible for doing roll calls to make sure all re ghters were accounted for and ensuring that water was getting to the water cannons washing down the re from outside. ree hours a er the initial alarm, the re was under control, several homes had been saved, and no one was dead. Fires like that, where things go well, do not take away from the pain of errors made at the Deutsche Bank incident or the World Trade Center. ey suggest, instead, that the FDNY can learn from its tragedies. Even if it takes a decade.

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This Building Killed One Fireghter and May Save Dozens

A er deaths and close calls, getting wise to the wind
n the night of Jan. 5, 1996, Fire ghter James B. Williams was the can man for his company, Ladder 121, when it pulled up to the 13-story building at 40-20 Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway a er just a er 10 p.m. It was windy. Ladder 121 arrived four minutes a er the 911 call came in reporting re in a third- oor apartment. Capt. John Rokee led Williams and Fire ghter Brian Gallagher into the lobby and up the stairs to the third oor. Other re ghters on the scene took to their assigned tasks. Engine companies grabbed hoses and nozzles o their rigs and marched into the building. Rokee and his men came to the entrance to the re apartment, put on their face masks and pushed through the unlocked door, Rokee and Williams moving to the le , Gallagher to the rightall three searching for people who might be trapped inside. ey got about 10 feet in. Within 15 seconds, an investigation later found, conditions in the apartment deteriorated to extreme heat and blinding smoke conditions. Rokee, the report said, saw a reball coming at him from within the apartment. e temperature in the apartment became unbearable. Out in the hallway, three engine company re ghters were quickly surrounded by smoke; they hit the ground and hurriedly put on their masks. Heat roared from apartment 3F, burning these men on their faces and ears and forcing them to evacuate. Outside, residents screamed for help from windows, and re dispatchers began to get calls from panicky people and elderly folks stuck inside. Rokee, Gallagher and Williams ed down the hall. e apartment door stuck open as they ran out, allowing the heat and smoke to race a er them. e hallway was shaped like a T, with the exit located at the long end. As they hustled out of

CHAPTER THREE
In 1996, a reghter was killed at this building on Beach Channel Drive in the Rockaways. In 2006, a near fatal experience at another re here helped prod the FDNY to rethink the way it deals with wind-driven blazes.

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the aming apartment, all three men missed the turn. Rokee and Gallagher found their way back to the corner and down the hall. Williams did not, and collapsed. In the anxious moments that followed, a re ghter from another ladder company crawled into the hallway, found the hose the engine company had dropped and moved into position to spray the re but came upon Williams lying in the hall. It took several re ghters to get Williams down the stairs and into the street. He was pronounced dead at Peninsula General Hospital. A lot went wrong the night Jimmy Williams died. As at Deutsche Bank 11 years later, the delay (a half hour this time) in getting water on the re was devastating. FDNY investigators blamed this largely on one engine company bringing the wrong hose and trying to hook up to the standpipe so close to the re that they were exposed to ame and smoke and were unable to nish the job. But the report concluded that adverse weather conditions were a signi cant contributing factor. e tenant in the re apartment had le her window open. When the door to the re apartment was opened, gusting winds drove the re back into the apartment and toward the members of Ladder 121, the report found. Ten years later, on Jan. 27, 2006, there was a re in a sixth- oor apartment in the same building, 40-20 Beach Channel Drive, which is a 234-unit building owned by the New York City Housing Authority. irty-three FDNY units responded, led by Ladder 121. is time, it was the apartment door that was WIND AND FIRE le open. As re ghters were searching the room for vicWatch videos of the NIST tests www.citylimits.org/re tims, the windows failed and 40-mph winds turned the re into a blowtorch. Fire ghter James T. Byrne grabbed a probationary re ghter working with him and ran to a nearby apartment to seek refuge. ere he heard a Mayday, crawled back into the hallway and discovered Fire ghter Kevin McCarthy lying on the ground near the door to the re apartment, surrounded by ame. Byrne dragged McCarthy 22 feet to safety. For this, Byrne won the FDNYs highest medal for valor. Had he not acted, 40-20 Beach Channel Drive might have killed a second re ghter. As it was, 10 re ghters were injured in the blaze. Less than a month later, 138 re ghters responded to a blaze at Tracey Towers, a two-building high-rise complex on Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx. By the time the re was brought under control, ames had lapped from the 24th oor to the 30th, and nine re ghters were injured, including one who su ered second- and third-degree burns. e wind conditions were terrible,

Mike Parrella, a re department spokesman, told the local Norwood News. Wind has been a factor in at least ve FDNY deaths since 1991. e two nearly disastrous wind-driven res in 2006 spurred the FDNY to consider new ways of approaching a re when ame and wind are allied against them. Luckily, the hunt for better methods was already under waythanks, in no small measure, to Lionel Hampton.

At the Fire
Members of engine and ladder companies do specic jobs at a re. Engine companies extinguish res. They operate re engines (pumpers). At a re, the engine company must locate a working hydrant and connect enough hose to reach from their engine to the re itself.
Ofcer Either a captain or a lieutenant who leads the team. Chauffeur Also called motor pump operator. Drives the engine and operates the water pump. Control Assists in hooking up to the hydrant and stretching the hose from the engine to the re. Nozzle Leads the hose team, aims the hose. Backup Helps the nozzle maneuver the hose and can take over the nozzle position.

A BETTER WAY?

A year after James Williams died, a breeze blew through an open window in the 28th- oor apartment near Lincoln Center where Hampton, the legendary jazz vibraphonist, lived. It knocked over a halogen lamp, which fell on a bed, starting a re. A woman with Hampton in the apartment apparently opened a window to relieve the smoke and then, to get the wheelchair-bound 82-year-old band leader out of his at, propped the apartment door open. Soon, says former FDNY battalion chief Gerry Tracey, the winddriven re became a blow torch. Tracey retired from the FDNY in 2009 with 31 years of experience. Back in the 1990s, he was the commander of a ladder company that responded to the Lionel Hampton blaze. He was o duty the day of the re but later learned what happened: As they responded to the alarm, re companies came up a stairway that put them 54 feet from the door to Hamptons apartment. Bu eted by heat and re, it took the FDNY 45 minutes to cover that distance. e heat was so intense that one lieutenant was burned by the brass ring of his helmet. We kept sending companies. We went through eight engine companies, Tracey says. e fuel sort of burnt away. ats what allowed entry, nally, to that apartment. Eleven re ghters were hospitalized. Mayor Giuliani told e New York Times that a re that could have been life threatening was an inconvenience with some injuries, none of them life threatening and most sustained by re ghters. But Tracey knew that the e ort it took to extinguish the Hampton blaze was a wake-up call. A er that, I began taking a look at our tactics. e only tactic we attempted to employ at the time was the direct, frontal attackmeeting this re head-on and trying to do battle with it, he says. I said to myself, eres got to be a better way. e year a er the Lionel Hampton re, the FDNY received another costly object lesson on the power of wind. At a re on Vandalia Avenue in East New York in December 1998, Lt. Joseph Cavalieri and re ghters Christopher Bopp and James Bohan from Ladder 170 opened the door to a 10th- oor apartment and

Ladder companies (sometimes called truck companies) ride a re truck and are responsible for forcing entry, searching for victims, locating and tracking a re, and opening holes in structures to relieve a res smoke and heat.
Ofcer Either a captain or a lieutenant who leads the team. Irons Also called the forcible entry reghter. Carries tools to force open doors or rip into walls and ceilings. Can Carries a re extinguisher. He and the irons search the inside of a building. Roof Searches for victims and re extension above the re. Might cut holes in a roof or ceiling to allow a re to vent. Outside Vent Assists in the search for victims and re extension. Smashes windows and makes other openings to ventilate the re.

were caught in a wind-driven blast of ame. Some re ghters heard two maydays, but it wasnt clear who they were from. It took the rst engine company three tries to get a hose line anywhere near the re, so intense was the heat. Only when the engine company got close to the apartment door did they discover the rst of the three, badly burned men. e other two were found a short time later. All three died.

A PRESSURE PHENOMENON

A re is not a simple matter of ame on fuel. A re feeds on oxygen. It thirsts to burn e ciently and produces smoke when it does not. It can ignite its own vapors. And it produces pressure, heating air so that molecules ricochet o one another creating gasses that expand, seeking release. It is this force that pushes smoke into the paths of people eeing down stairways: Fire and smoke want to go where they arent. is has long been recognized by the re service. In fact, in 1972, the FDNY used one of the buildings that were to be torn down to make way for the construction of the World Trade

Center to conduct a test in which stairwells were pressurized to keep smoke out. is technology was eventually required by code in new high-rise buildings that lack sprinklerssuch a system uses fans located on the buildings roof to pump air into stairwells so that when doors are open, smoke is pushed away from the exits. But many buildings were not covered by that requirement. So if pressurizing stairwells was something a re department needed to do, a portable fan would be necessary. e problem, says National Institute of Standards and Technology researcher Dan Madrzykowski, is that re departments have a hard time getting private industry to produce the gizmos they need. e re service is rather small, and so, as a result, there are very few things that would be made just to serve them, he says. Many times were looking for tie-ins for somebody who is making a tremendous amount of technology for the military for some purpose and can also develop it for the re service. ermal-imaging cameras, for instance, which are used by re ghters to detect re behind walls and civilians behind smoke, came into re department

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Fireghters brought a window blanket, which could have been used to seal out the wind, to the January 2008 re where Lt. John Martinson died. But it was never deployed.
use only because the military was buying them. Luckily, the way Madrzykowski remembers it, about 20 years ago a re ghter saw a fan being used to in ate a hot-air balloon and realized it could be handy at re scenes. But in the early years, these fans were used for negative pressurizationdrawing air away from a re, usually as a way to clear out smoke once a re was mostly under control. In the mid-1990s, however, interest was turning to positive pressurizationusing fans to force smoke or even ame back toward their area of origin and maybe to resist the wind. is shi became possible because the fans in play got much more powerfulfrom producing air at 3,400 cubic feet per minute to more like 24,000 cubic feet per minute. Before the Lionel Hampton re, Tracey had been hearing about pressurization research at re ghting conferences. e idea rst appealed to him as a way to keep smoke out of stairwells and possibly spare re ghters the danger of retreating to a stairwell when they were low on air only to nd that it, too, was contaminated with smoke. But a er the Lincoln Center re, he and Madrzykowski began talking about a more intense use of fans to counter the force of wind on a re. Some small-scale testing went forward. It wasnt until early 2006 that Tracey and Madrzykowski received permission to practice in a full building: a closed school in Toledo, Ohio. Using theatrical smoke, NIST was able to demonstrate that fans could e ectively control smoke. But to explore the fans value in ghting not just smoke but re, they needed a structure that they could actually burn. Later in 2006, Chicago permitted a controlled burn in a building that was about to be torn down. e

test involved setting res in three apartments on each of four selected oors in the 16-story building. e rooms were lled with hotel furnishings to make sure each room was identical to the others. Preparing the building took a week. In three of the rooms, windows were broken and arti cial wind was created to simulate the conditions at a wind-driven re. Video of the testthe brief bit that is visible before the raging res destroyed what Tracey says was $18,000 worth of camera equipmentshows a small fire exploding as soon as the wind hits it. Flames blast out of the apartment door, with temperature readings on a hallway wall jumping from 71 degrees to 1,000 degrees in a matter of seconds. It was this video that we brought back to NYC, to show to FDNY leaders, Tracey says. eir jaws dropped. e FDNY, which had been permitting Tracey to travel on department time to conduct his research and had just su ered the near-misses at 40-20 Beach Channel Drive and Tracey Towers, began preparing for a New York City test of strategies for battling wind-driven blazes like the one captured on video in Chicago. As it turns out, several high-rise buildings that were part of the former Coast Guard base on Governors Island were about to be torn down.

Burning, Down
Structural res in New York City, 1993-2010
30,481 30,626 30,152 29,281 28,596 27,788 27,105 26,248 27,718 29,429 29,217 28,455 27,817 28,004 26,862 26,748 30,652

26,666

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

00

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09

10

Source: FDNY

A DEATH INTERVENES

On Jan. 3, 2008, Lt. John Martinson led Engine Company 249 up the stairs to the 14th oor of a residential building at 1700 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. He le his nozzle man, control and backup in the stairwell and went into the smoky hallway to nd the re apartment. He wasnt seen again until 21 minutes later, when a re ghter found him unconscious a few feet from the re. Martinson never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead later that night. e FDNYs investigation found that the deadly blaze had been wind impacted, rather than wind driven, because the nights 20-mph gusts ebbed and owed in their e ect on the ames. But wind was certainly an issue. Fire ghters brought a window blanket, which is used to seal o a window where the glass has broken, into the lobby of 1700 Bedford but not up to the oor above the re, where it might have been used to block the wind. At the time, at least, department policy did not require them to do so. at was about to change. In February 2008, the FDNY conducted 14 test res on Governors Island. ey tested positive-pressurization fans to push against the wind, window blankets and a newly developed highrise nozzle with a bend that allowed re ghters to ght a re from the windows of the oor below the blaze.

e test demonstrated that the combination of these methods clears it in a matter of seconds. It drops the temperature by 50 percent, Tracey says. Wind control devices help us move in on a re. In the wake of the test, the FDNY rewrote standard operating procedures and updated its training guides. Of the equipmentfans, blankets and nozzlesFDNY spokesman Frank Gribbon says, ey are out in the eld. ey are distributed job-wide. According to Madrzykowski, the FDNY has been the leader in this research. Equipment is just one part of the equation, though. One of the challenges that were working on with the re service is getting them to recognize the wind and change their tactics, he says. For example, re departments usually ght a re from the unburned side of a house toward the burning side, so as to limit the damage they do. But if the wind is in their face, that approach puts them right in the path of the blowtorch. In New York, resistance to the new ideas, Tracey says, has been from o cers who have worked in busy shops and have had good experiences performing the tactics as they learned them. If FDNY tactics arent broken, their logic goes, why x them? Indeed, window blankets had been shown to have a positive e ect on wind-driven res in FDNY tests conducted in 1999 in the wake of the Vandalia Avenue tragedy, but despite

numerous injuries at wind-driven res in the intervening years, werent integrated into departmental doctrine until a er Martinsons 2008 death. e changes suggested by the wind re research do challenge well-established re ghting doctrine. For instance, in a high-rise re, one of the rst things re ghters do is open the bulkhead door at the top of the stairwell. is is to relieve the smoke that might otherwise harm re ghters and civilians taking shelter in the stairs. Its a great idea, except when a wind-driven re is on the other side of the stairwell door. When thats the case, every time the stairwell door is open, anyone between that door and the opening in the roof is in the uedirectly in the path of the heat and smoke that hunger for the oxygen outside that bulkhead door. We do not open that roof door if we want to try to create equilibrium of pressure, Tracey says. In some ways, the FDNY still uses re ghting strategies that, Tracey says, were born on tenement tactics. Still, he adds, the FDNY, I think, is ahead of the curve with many departments. eyve been held back because of the economy. Change costs money, a er all.

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CHAPTER FOUR

When Fire Wins

In re ghters deaths, patterns emerge.
uring his 20 years in the New York City Fire Department, Vincent Fowler had thought more than most re ghters about death. A veteran of four di erent re companies during his time on the job, Fowler developed a step-by-step protocol for rehouses to follow when one of their members is killed at a re. One of the rst things he told the men surviving was to call their wives, Ramona Fowler recalls. However, Fowler did not speak of the possibility that he might die. Nor did his wife dwell on the dangers of his job. A er you get through a certain amount of time, you gure that its not going to be him, she says of the father of three. ough hed reached the point where he could have le the job and started drawing a pension, Fowler had decided not to even consider retirement until his three daughters nished college. He needed the salary, and he liked the work. Fowler had attained the rank of captain and was studying for the battalion chief s test when, on June 3, 1999, he responded to a house re at 150-28 127th Street in South Ozone Park, Queens. He went into a cellar, ran out of air and collapsed. Soon a er, Ramona Fowler received a phone call, but not from her husband. e next day, Capt. Fowlers death noti cation procedures were executed for his own demise. Fowler was one of 43 New York City re ghters to die in the line of duty in the decade before and the decade a er the Sept. 11 disaster. Ten died of heart attacks or other acute medical problems. Ten perished in collapses and four from falls and 18 died of burns or smoke inhalation. One was killed in combat as an Army reservist in Iraq, but his passing was considered a line-of-duty death. Each death involved a unique person and unique circumstances. But according to investigations by the FDNY and
Derek Vincent Kelly, the late Vincent Fowlers grandson. When we asked to see Capt. Fowlers helmet, the three-year-old insisted on donning his own.

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Jeanette Meyran and her daughters (Angela, 16, on the left, and 13-year-old Danine) in a room lled with mementos of the late Lt. Curtis Meyran.

the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, common contributing factors link many of the deaths. City Limits obtained FDNY investigation reports on 25 of the 1991-2011 deaths and NIOSH ndings on 21 of the deaths during that span, including eight fatalities not covered by the documents that FDNY provided in response to our freedom of information requests.) e FDNY has moved to address some of these factors. Other problems have proved more di cult to solve. And some, of course, might be inseparable from the risky work of ghting res and saving re victims.

SOMETIMES IT WAS WRONG INFORMATION.

Jan. 23, 2005, was a brutally cold dayso icy that Jeanette Meyran opted to walk to the grocery store near her Long Island home rather than risk driving there. Her husband, Lt. Curtis Meyran, had gone to work at a rehouse in the Bronx. He had been promoted to lieutenant two years earlier and was covering shi s at di erent rehouses to ll in for o cers who were on leave or vacation until a permanent spot was found for him. Walking back with her groceries in hand, Jeanette got a call from her son at home. ere was an FDNY captain at the

house. She dropped her groceries and moved as fast as she could across the frozen ground. All the captain told her on the drive to St. Barnabas Hospital was that her husband was hurt. She remembers being hustled into a hospital room, where she saw a small man. I know this man, she recalls saying to herself. Who is this man? e man came over to her, put his arm around her and said, Im so sorry. She still did not recognize him. What are you sorry about? she asked. Anxious glances were exchanged around the room; the men there suddenly realized that she hadnt been told the full story. e small man turned to her again: He didnt make it. Soon, Jeanette Meyran realized that the small man was the mayor of the city of New York and that her husband was dead. He and ve other re ghters had been driven by re out of a fourth-story window on 178th Street in the Bronx. Meyran and Fire ghter John Bellew, a member of Ladder 27 under Meyrans command, were killed in the fall. e other four were critically injured. Bellew and Meyran were only the FDNYs rst casualties on what would come to be known as Black Sunday; a few hours later, Fire ghter Richard Sclafani would be pulled unresponsive out of a cellar in Brooklyn, where hed been overcome by smoke. e deaths at 178th Street were blamed largely on an illegal

subdivision of apartments that created a deadly maze for re ghters. A jury in 2009 acquitted the tenants, and last year a judge threw out on technical grounds a lower courts conviction of the building owner. e Bronx district attorney is appealing the latter decision. But several other factors played a role in the deaths on 178th Street. e FDNY investigation, for instance, found that there were many failures of communications procedures. In many instances, members aware of important, even life-threatening information, did not transmit the information properly, did not get an acknowledgement, or simply never transmitted the information to anyone. For instance, re ghters inside the building didnt tell the incident commander that the re was getting worse, and the commander didnt pursue information about searches going on inside. And when o cers on the oor above realized that there were members trapped, they failed to notify the incident commander. e ndings do not surprise Al Turi, a retired 34-year veteran of the FDNY who served as chief of safety in late 2001 into 2002. Communications always played some kind of role in almost every re ghter fatality that I looked at, Turi says. Sometimes it could have been handie-talkie or radio problems. Sometimes it could have been information that wasnt received by the chief at the command post. Sometimes it was information that was not received by the individual units or members. Sometimes it was wrong information. After the 2008 death of Lt. John Martinson on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, investigators found that handie-talkie communications at the scene did not give a clear and concise picture of re conditions or the actions taken by units. e same was said of the third Black Sunday death, that of Sclafani. O en, the radio confusion is a result of the number of voices trying to crowd onto a single channel. At the Deutsche Bank re, investigators found, commanders waited too long to establish a command channel that would have allowed chiefs to separate their strategic discussions from the jumbled, step-by-step talk on the channel used by rank-and- le re ghters. Maydays are a particular subject of concern. In several deaths over the years, investigations cited a failure of re ghters to issue Maydays or commanders to acknowledge them. One re lieutenant, who did not want to be quoted by name, says that before Sept. 11, re ghters avoided issuing Maydays because there was a stigma associated with them. It meant you frightened too easily or were a bad re ghter who had gotten himself into trouble. At deadly res in 1994 and 1998, investigators pointed to the absence of an emergency tone that would have

allowed commanders to take control of the radio network in the event of a Mayday. e lack of such a tone was also cited in the McKinsey report on Sept. 11. Over the years, the Mayday stigma has faded. I always told my guys, Give the Mayday. We can laugh about it later, recalls one retired chief. e lieutenant says of his men, Its embedded in them now: If you feel like youre in a situation and you try to get out yourself, you waste time. Fred LaFemina, a recently retired FDNY chief with 16 READ THE REPORTS years experience in rescue companies, says, I heard Excerpts from fatality investigations more Maydays in 2005 [a er www.citylimits.org/re the Black Sunday tragedies] probably than I heard in my whole career. According to the re o cers union, every night at least one FDNY company conducts a drill to practice Mayday procedures. On the technical side, there has also been progress. Fire ghters now have a button on their external microphone that allows them to boost their radio signal when they are in danger. And re o cers can now conduct electronic roll calls to see if any re ghter is in trouble. But re ghters still tend to delay transmitting a Mayday. Studies indicate that it takes an average of 22 minutes to locate and remove a lost re ghter. at means if you issue a distress call when you have but moments to spare, it is too late.

GETTING LOST, FALLING DOWN

Since 1977, re ghter deaths in the U.S. have averaged 100 a year. National re ghter fatality statistics point to common patterns in re ghter deaths. For instance, many re ghters die traveling to or from a re. Many other deaths are blamed on overexertion (see e Heart Attack Risk, p. 32). Getting lost is another frequent factor in fatalities. ats what happened to Fire ghter omas Brick, a 30-year-old with two years on the FDNY, on Dec. 16, 2003, when his ladder company was sent into a second- oor furniture warehouse on Manhattans Tenth Avenue to look for the seat, or location, of what was eventually a four-alarm re. ere was a lot of stock in the store, creating a kind of maze, and the smoke was so heavy that Brick and two of his company mates had to crawl around the merchandise to try to nd the re. A er 10 minutes in the room, the ladder company o cer ordered his men out. A er escaping, the o cer quickly realized that Brick hadnt made it down to the street and alerted the chief in command. About the same time, two re ghters directing a hose stream toward the re thought they heard a scream and

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turned o the water to call and listen, but they heard nothing more. For several crucial minutes, Bricks o cer thought Brick had been located and was safe. By the time the mistake had been discovered, other re ghters had evacuated the building. ey eventually found Brick face down in a pool of water. He was the rst re ghter lost in action a er September 11. A lot of re ghters are dying because they got lost, FDNY Battalion Chief John Salka told a podcast interviewer at Fire Engineering magazine earlier this year. Salka runs training sessions around the country, some of them focusing solely on how to avoid getting disoriented when smoke has plunged a room into total darkness and you need to get out. He teaches re ghters to map the room as they enter it, to feel the furniture between the door and wherever they go, so they can feel their way out when its time to leave. Along with navigating smoke-blanketed rooms, operating at heights is another integral part of the re ghters job, and it also comes with risks. In February 1992, omas Williams, a lieutenant in Rescue 4, fell out of a second- oor window at a re in Queens. e exact cause of the fall was never determined. In 2007 a 23-year-old re ghter named Daniel Pujdak climbed a ladder to the roof of a burning building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a tool in each hand and a roof saw slung over his back. When he reached the top of the building, he tried to jump from the ladder to a parapet wall that ringed the roof. e saw apparently shi ed as he made his leap, and he lost his balance, falling 60 feet to his death. A federal investigation of Pujdaks death found that he might have had a safer way o the ladder than jumping to the parapet wall. But it also noted that re departments should consider reducing the amount of equipment that re ghters must carry while climbing ladders. A re ghters bunker gearjacket, pants and bootscan weigh 35 to 40 pounds. Add that to a 15-pound air tank and a helmet of perhaps ve pounds and a re ghter is lugging around 55 to 60 pounds before he or she even picks up a hose

or tool. e amount of gear a re ghter carries and wears is becoming a safety issue. ey carry too much gear, veteran re chief Vincent Dunn says. ere will have to be a limit to equipment weight carried by a re ghter. But a signi cant amount of the weight that re ghters carry today is safety equipment. e specially insulated bunker gear was introduced a er a 1994 re in Soho at which Captain John Drennan and re ghters James Young and Christopher Seidenburg were killed in a backdra an explosion that occurs when a door is opened to a room in which an intense but oxygen-starved re lays waiting. e new equipment helped reduce re ghter burns dramatically, from 1,545 in 1993 to 241 in 2010. We do feel that we have the best gear but we are always in search of something potentially better, Deputy Commissioner Frank Gribbon, the FDNY spokesman, says. Other equipment issues have proved easier to solve, albeit a er some costly lessons. Earlier this year, the FDNY moved to replace the gloves used by re ghters a er several members sustained burns; it turned out the manufacturer had switched materials, making the gloves less reliable. And a er the Black Sunday re on 178th Street, the FDNY restored personal safety ropes, which had been removed from service in 2000. Critics claimed the ropes were withdrawn as a cost-cutting move, but the FDNY says they were pulled because few re ghters used them, although a er the 178th Street tragedy. e Safety Battalion, however, pointed out the foolishness of the departments having re ghters continue to wear the harness for the ropes but not the ropes themselves. e newly issued rope is less bulky and, Gribbon says, has come in handy in a few emergencies. (In a pending case, Jeanette Meyran has sued the city over the role the missing ropes played in her husbands death.)

RUNNING OUT OF AIR

Investigations into the deaths of at least 10 FDNY members since 1991 have put some of the blame on re ghters themselves

for not using their self-contained breathing apparatus. At the re Causes of U.S. reghter deaths in 2010 that killed Bellew and Meyran, for instance, re ghters didnt leave the danger zone even a er Asphyxiation Trauma a Vibralertwhich buzzes when 31% a firefighters air is running lowsounded. Robert Ryans 8% removal of his mask was cited in Other 5% his 2008 death. At the Deutsche Bank re, probers found that some re ghters opted to take occasional hits from their air 56% tank rather than keep their mask on, a dangerous practice that Sudden cardiac death / stroke appeals to re ghters because it allows them to ght a re Source: NFPA for longer. Its important to recognize that FDNY investigations of re tragedies are a case of an entity probing itself. While many if anything, they used to laugh at him because theyd be out on of these reports do implicitly criticize department policy, the an open street at a car re and hed still be putting the mask ndings are sometimes distrusted by the rank and le and on. ere was no way he was using a cheater mask, she says. by family members who see them as attempts to shi blame A er-action reports can sometimes miss the factors that to the victim or from a higher o cer to a lower-ranking one. might lead a re ghter to make a move that, out of context, When Lt. George Lener was found unconscious in a base- seems foolish. e death investigation for Capt. Fowler listed ment of a burning building on Tribecas Worth Street in June as a direct cause the fact that he failed to follow SCBA pro1994, he was not wearing his mask (his facepiece) and in the cedures by not exiting the re area when the Vibralert alarm cellar, investigators also found a cheateran unapproved sounded. It added: Upon depletion of his air supply, he device that re ghters use to breathe without donning their removed his facepiece and inhaled high levels of products of full mask, because the mask can make seeing and commu- combustion. nicating hard. But Fowlers widow, Ramona, believes that he remained in Lener died six weeks later. e report on Leners death found the basement because he did not want to leave one of his men, that he had failed to follow department procedure for air use. a probationary re ghter, alone. eres no way he would But his widow, Maura, doesnt believe that. Every man that have not stayed behind. Especially if you knew Vinnie Fowler. ever worked with him said, Absolutely not. Because they said, Of course, sometimes re ghters do take unnecessary risks.

Why they die

In the Line of Duty

FDNY deaths, Sept. 11, 1991 to present

SEPT. 13, 1991 Fireghter Kevin Kane dies after a ceiling collapses at a re in Brooklyn.

JAN. 9, 1993 Fireghter Arthur Tuck dies of complications from a heart attack he suffered nine months earlier at a restaurant re in Queens.

JULY 20, 1994 Lt. George Lener dies after a long battle following injuries suffered at a re in Manhattan.

JAN. 3, 1995 Fireghter Thomas Wylie is killed at a re in Manhattan.

OCT. 8, 1995 Fireghter Peter McLoughlin dies at a re in Queens.

JAN. 5, 1996 Fireghter James Williams dies in a wind-driven re in the Rockaways.

APRIL 29, 1998 Fireghter Raymond Nakovics dies of a heart attack at a re in Manhattan.

FEB. 25, 1992 Lt. Thomas Williams falls out a window at a re in Queens.

MARCH 28, 1994 Capt. John Drennan and Fireghters James Young and Christopher Siedenburg are killed by a backdraft at a Manhattan re.

OCT. 4, 1994 Capt. Wayne Smith dies 59 days after being burned at a Queens re.

MARCH 7, 1995 Lt. Raymond Schiebel dies of a heart attack at a re in Brooklyn.

DEC. 31, 1995 Lieutenant John Clancy is killed in a collapse at a re in Queens.

FEB. 5, 1996 Fireghter Louis Valentino is killed in a roof collapse at a Brooklyn re.

JUNE 5, 1998 Lt. James Blackmore and Capt. Scott Lapiedra are fatally injured in a collapse at a re on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

1991
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John Clancy was only 35 when he died at a re in a vacant house on New Years Eve, 1995. A oor collapsed under him and plunged him into a flaming basement. A erward, investigators said one of the direct causes of his death was the fact that he was not wearing his facepiece. His widow simply cannot be certain he was wearing it. He might not. I would hope that he would have worn it. I cant say for sure, she says. at was his personality. He was rebellious. Current and retired reghters acknowledge that in the past, many firefighters 62 Watts Street is where, in March 1994, Captain John Drennan and reghters Christopher failed to wear their breathing Seidenburg and James Young were caught in a backdraft. All died from their injuries. masks properly. In part, this was because of problems with And sometimes a family just cant say with certainty what the equipment, especially in seeing and communicating. But happened in their loved ones nal moments. When Dawn it also re ected macho attitudes and ignorance of the risks Clancy met her future husband, John, in college, they were posed by a res fumes. Word is, those attitudes are changing. both studying to be accountantsnot a risky profession. But Guys would try to be tough, suck up the smoke, says the John Clancys dad was an FDNY battalion chief. Accounting lieutenant. Whats actually burning now, all the plastic and was just a fallback a er Clancys re department entrance exam stu , itd be crazy. If you suck up a TV thats on re, thats 10 was held up by litigation over women joining the department. years o your life. He notes that todays masks are easier to When he nally got the call, that was it for accounting, Dawn see and talk through. recalls. John loved adventure, living on the edge. He liked to But behavior by re ghters is not the only issue. Many death scuba dive, his wife recalls. And he loved being a re ghter. investigations point to problems with the breathing equipment I wasnt thrilled about it, only because of the danger aspect itself. Most New York City re ghters wear 45-minute air tanks, of it. But he loved it, and I knew that he was going to be much but they rarely last that long. How long they last depends a happier being a re ghter than being an accountant. lot on a re ghters size, physical condition and age. If youre

out of shape, says the lieutenant, youre going to suck down a bottle a lot quicker. However, at several deadly incidents, even taking these individual characteristics into account, air tanks have provided a surprisingly short span of protection. At the re where Fowler died, several re ghters ran out of air a er spending durations as short as ve to eight minutes in the building. Robert Ryan ran out of air in only six or seven minutes at the 2008 re that killed him. e hose on Richard Sclafanis air pack may have split, causing his air supply to escape with deadly speed. A er Robert Beddia died at the Deutsche Bank building, his family sued the city for, among other things, negligently failing to provide the decedent or otherwise to ensure that the decedent was equipped with the proper equipment, including but not limited to a proper and functional respirator or other breathing apparatus. e case is pending. But Gribbon insists that the FDNY has the best air supply available: We feel that theres nothing better out there. Federally funded research is driving toward a lighter, smaller at pack that contains more air, but its likely to be years before that device is available. Similar questions surround the personal assist and safety system, or PASS, alarms that re ghters wear. ese are meant to help re ghters locate a missing colleague; they go o automatically when a re ghter stops moving for 30 seconds. A re ghter can also sound his PASS alarm manually if he or she is in danger. At some earlier incidents, like Clancys death, PASS alarms were not armed by their wearers, so now they arm as soon as a re ghters breathing tank is used. But at some more recent deadly res, the alarms failed to sound or were too so to hear. In other instances, re ghters appear to have ignored the alarms because they go o so frequently. e FDNY recently spent $6.6 million on the latest generation of alarms meant to save a motionless re ghter.

WHEN BUILDINGS FAIL

Fire ghter Harry Ford used to play the lottery, and on one occasion this habit made him vulnerable to a practical joke in his Brooklyn rehouse. His buddies learned the numbers hed played the night before and posted them on the bulletin board as that days winners. When Ford saw that hed hit the jackpot, he addressed his brethren. He said to them, Im out of here! and started up the stairs to clear out his gear. Suddenly sheepish that their joke had so totally fooled such a beloved friend, the guys broke the truth to Ford. He was, his wife says, totally unfazed. For one thing, he was pleased that for 15 minutes I knew what it felt like to be a millionaire. For another, Ford had never expressed a desire to do anything other than ght res. Hed had a career as a grip on movie sets before joining the re departmentyou can actually catch a eeting glimpse of him in e Exorcistand still did that work on the side. But he loved the job, talked of staying in the department for up to 35 years and never showed any interest in becoming an o cer, despite getting encouragement to do so. Ford was one of three re ghters who died in the infamous Fathers Day disastera cruel prelude in June 2001 to the mass death that awaited the FDNY family in September of that year. Along with Brian Fahey and John Downing, Ford responded to a re at a hardware store on Astoria Boulevard. e re was concentrated in a basement where paint and other chemicals were stored. Fire ghters outside the building heard aerosol cans exploding in the heat and saw green and yellow smoke, but no one shared that informationwhich might have indicated an unusual re was under wayto the chief in charge. Suddenly there was a strong smell of lacquer, and the building exploded, burying several re ghters and killing the three men. Collapses have always been big killers of re ghters. Dunn dedicated his 1988 re ghting book Collapse of Burning Buildings to the 46 FDNY members whod were killed in collapses from 1956 to 1986. In the pages of Dunns book, the

DEC. 18, 1998 Lt. Joseph Cavalieri and Fireghters James Bohan and Christopher Bopp are killed at a re on Vandalia Avenue in Brooklyn.

NOV. 15, 2000 Fireghter Kenneth Kerr dies of a heart attack after returning to his rehouse from a re.

JAN. 13, 2001 Fireghter Donald Franklin dies of a heart attack at a Bronx re.

AUG. 28, 2001 After suffering a heart attack, Fireghter Michael Gorumba dies at a re in Staten Island.

SEPT. 27, 2003 Fireghter James OShea dies of a heart attack shortly after going off-duty.

JUNE 4, 1999 Captain Vincent Fowler dies after being overcome at a house re in Queens.

JAN. 4, 2001 Fireghter Gregg McLoughlin dies of a heart attack while exercising at his rehouse.

JUNE 17, 2001 Fireghters John Downing, Brian Fahey and Harry Ford die in an explosion at a hardware store re in Queens.

JAN. 23, 2005 Lt. Curtis Meyran and Fireghter John Bellew die after a fall from a burning building in the Bronx. Fireghter Richard Sclafani dies at a house re in Brooklyn.

JUNE 21, 2007 Fireghter Daniel Pujdak falls to his death from the roof of a burning Brooklyn building.

JAN. 3, 2008 Lt. John Martinson is killed at a re in Brooklyn. NOV. 10, 2008 Fireghter Jamel Sears collapses while training on Randalls Island, then dies.

NOV. 23, 2008 Lt. Robert Ryan dies at a house re in Staten Island.

SEPT. 11, 2001 343 FDNY personnel die in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

DEC. 16, 2003 Fireghter Thomas Brick dies in a furniture warehouse re.

AUG. 27, 2006 Lt. Howard Carpluk and Fireghter Michael Reilly are fatally injured in a collapse in the Bronx.

AUG. 18, 2007 Fireghters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino die at the Deutsche Bank building.

AUG. 11, 2009 Fireghter Paul Warhola dies of a stroke suffered while responding to a re alarm in Brooklyn.

2009
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The Heart Attack Threat

Fireghters deadliest enemy
their breathing gear. Another is exertion: Not only do reghters have to perform extremely difcult tasks, but they also must switch instantly from sitting peacefully to rushing around with heavy gear, under circumstances in which fear and stress raise their blood pressure, perhaps after they have been on duty for up to 24 hours. Even the noise that reghters are subjected to (screaming sirens, whining roof saws, crackling radios) might contribute to heart strain. Heat stress can also cause heart attacks, and ghting res is hot work. The heavy gear reghters wear makes even the ride to a re a heat-stress risk. Our core temperature is heating up before we get to the box, says retired FDNY battalion chief Gerry Tracey. Our core temperature can be 99 or 100 degrees before we go into a building to ght the re. (It was 88 degrees the day Gorumba died.) To reduce the risk of heart attack, the CDC recommends that re departments take steps to cool down reghters, providing breaks and rehydrating them. Rehab is a big buzzword, says retired FDNY lieutenant Steve Mormino, from the National Fireghter Near Miss Reporting System. Actually, there are three buzzwordsrehab, re-evaluate, rehydrate. Some departments are bringing misters and special cooling chairs to re scenes. According to its current strategic plan, the FDNY is providing stricter heart screenings as part of the annual medical checkup reghters receive, setting up cardiac health and smokingcessation programs and planning new efforts to address dehydration and heat exhaustion. Department spokesman Frank Gribbon says the department is in the process of obtaining misters and cooling chairs. But recent budget cuts that reduce personnel in some fire companies could have health consequences: The CDC recommends that re departments ensure adequate stafng levels for operations to prevent overexertion. And one local re union ofcial notes that rehab starts before a rein other words, with the rest you take between calls. Between training and building inspections, reghters gripe that they dont get a lot of downtime these days. Gorumba had a heart murmur, but thats not what killed him. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health blamed a second heart problem called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Gorumba had never experienced any heart symptoms, and the FDNY didnt detect the condition when he joined the department, probably because it was at such an early stage. Even if it had been detected, its not clear that Gorumba would have been barred from the re department or that his death could have been avoided, because its difficult to distinguish cardiomyopathy cases that are serious enough to require treatment from those that arent. The only thing that might have saved Gorumba is if he had received medical attention earlier. His colleagues initially thought he was missing inside the re building. It took ve to 10 minutes for him to be found in the re truck, delaying CPR. Fire ghters need to recognize the importance of any unusual symptoms, report these symptoms to their ofcers, and inform their co-workers and superiors about their intentions to relocate. Likewise, crew members need to maintain constant contact with their assigned buddy, the report concluded.

Fireghter Michael Gorumba. Courtesy FDNY.

There were 138 reghters from 33 companies battling the Aug. 28, 2001, re at the L&S Collision Auto Body shop in Port Richmond, Staten Island, when one of them27-year-old Michael Gorumbabegan to have difculty breathing. He walked back to his companys engine, sat down and died. Gorumba was one of eight FDNY members to succumb to heart trouble from 1991 to now. Separately, the 2008 death of Jamel Sears, a 33-year-old who collapsed after a training exercise, was blamed on dehydration, but a heart condition contributed. The FDNYs most recent line-of-duty death, which claimed Paul Warhola in 2009, was caused by a stroke. Heart attacks are the single largest threat to reghters lives. According to the United States Fire Association, 44 percent of all line-of-duty reghter deaths from 1995 to 2004 were heartrelated. Several aspects of reghting contribute to elevated cardiac risk. One is smoke: Both carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide can cause heart disease and are present in the air even during the overhaul stage of a re, when many reghters remove

complexities of re ghting are laid bare, as Dunn describes the unique collapse risks of metal roofs, wooden structures, parapet walls, stairways and more. Saving your and your fellow re ghters life could require knowing the di erence between a re-cut beam and a mortise-and-tenon joint, keeping your foot on the hidden joist beneath a oor, or anticipating whats behind the ceiling you are about to pull down. In February 1996, Rescue 2s Louis Valentino was killed in the collapse of a chop shop on Glenwood Road in Brooklyn. e incident commander had pulled re ghters o the roof out of fear of collapse but, since the re looked about to come under control, did not call out the re ghters who were inside. Without warning, the ceiling collapsed. Ten years later at a re at a Bronx 99-cent store, re ghters were once again pulled o a roof but not from the interior. Suddenly, the oor collapsed, plunging 10 members into the cellar. Eight were saved, but Lt. Howard Carpluk and Fire ghter Michael Reilly proved di cult to nd. For an agonizing 30 minutes, Carpluk sent Mayday messages trying to direct his rescuers, as other re ghters clawed through stock from the 99-cent store or used sledgehammers to knock holes from an adjacent cellar into the one where the two men were trapped. You gotta go 10 to 15 feet back from where they are working, Carpluk radioed at one point. Reilly never made a sound. eir PASS alarms were not audible. e men were nally extracted a er more than an hour and 20 minutes but did not live. e cellar had been illegally and shoddily repaired a er an earlier re, and the Bronx district attorney sought to prosecute its architect for certifying that proper building plans had been carried out. e architect, Jose Vargas, died before being tried. Problems with building alterations or a lack of inspections have gured into at least 12 of the FDNYs line-of-duty deaths since 1991. Concern about the unknown risks lurking inside buildings has increased among re ghters since New Yorks mid-2000s building boom, especially when the building has been converted from a structure designed for one usesay a factoryto an entirely di erent purpose, like a residence. You get a little scared with the factories when you get in deep, says the lieutenant. Especially now that everything is Sheetrock. A building that used to be a factory is now a condominium. It becomes a maze in there. Another lieutenant, who also asked not to be named, recalls a time he had to throw a group of people out of an illegally converted building. His message to them was simple: If a re happens here, a lot of people are going to die.

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WATER, WATER, WATER

Kevin Kane, a re ghter from Ladder 110, died in a 1991 re at a crack house on Atkins Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn when a ceiling collapsed, blocking his escape and subjecting him to second- and third-degree burns on 82 percent of his body. e FDNY investigation found that a er the ceiling fell, re rapidly took possession of the room and without hose line

readily available Kane was unable to exit the room during the safe egress time, which is the very short span between when a re threatens to severely burn you and when its done the job. Engine 236 had a line stretched to the top oor and had water at about the time of the mishap but was unable to move the line into position to rescue Kane. Fire ghting is a mix of complex tactics and very simple concepts. At its very simple core, ghting res is about, as old timers say it, putting the wet stu on the red stu . Saving residents, avoiding getting trapped in a collapse, rescuing re ghters who get lostall of this is made substantially easier by putting the re out and dangerously di cult if the blaze continues to burn. In the recent radio interview, Salka joked that as the three most important things in real estate are location, location and location, the three most important things in re ghting, are water, water, water. More people are saved by the engine because they put the re out. ats the demon, he said. ats the dragon. All your e orts should be directed toward putting water on the re. Water problems have played an integral role in several FDNY tragedies over the past 20 years. e Deutsche Bank re grew to deadly proportions because of water delays. Water was crucial to both Black Sunday res: Meyran and Bellew were chased out the window because problems with water allowed

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Roster of Risks

Common causes of U.S. reghter deaths in 2010 MAYDAY MISTAKES Sometimes firefighters wait too long to call for help. Sometimes their colleagues make errors in responding to the distress call. EQUIPMENT ISSUES Heavy gear protects from ames but adds to overexertion risk. CROWDING Having too many reghters at a re can be dangerous if they clog narrow passageways and slow down escape for those running out of air. UNIT INTEGRITY In the confusion of a re, ofcers get separated from their companies and individuals get lost or start freelancing. PERSONNEL TRACKING With dozens of re companies responding to major incidents, it can be hard to keep track of who is and isnt in danger. COLLAPSES Traditional killers of reghters, these usually sudden events can transform a simple re into a deadly disaster. AGGRESSIVE TACTICS Fireghters are supposed to risk a lot to save a lot. Sometimes they lose everything.

Forty-three New York City reghters died in the line of duty in the decade before and the decade after the Sept. 11 disaster. Ten died of heart attacks or other acute medical problems. Ten perished in collapses and four from falls and 18 died of burns or smoke inhalation. One was killed in combat as an Army reservist in Iraq, but his passing was considered a line-of-duty death. Each death involved a unique person and unique circumstances. But according to investigations by the FDNY and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, common contributing factors link many of the deaths.

DELAYS IN GETTING WATER ON THE FIRE Snags, kinks, ice and human error slow down the hose and rob reghters of their best weapon. AIR TANK RUNS OUT TOO QUICKLY A reghters working time in a re depends on his age, size and physical condition. Sometimes air tanks run out more quickly than expected. FIREFIGHTER FAILS TO USE MASK Dead firefighters are often found with their masks off. In some cases, they may have been removed contrary to procedure. RADIO WOES Too many people on a channel can lead to reghters interrupting one another and to general confusion.

the Bronx re to spread, and e orts to pull Sclafani out of the Brooklyn basement were hampered because no one was operating a hose to protect the rescuers from the blaze; it took an astounding 22 minutes to remove him. In 1994, Lener was killed at a re where the sprinkler system was prematurely shut down. e 1998 Vandalia Avenue re, in which three re ghters were killed, also involved severe water problems. And Jimmy Williams death in that wind-driven blaze on Beach Channel Drive in 1996 was blamed partly on a mistake made by the rst hose team, whod hooked up to a standpipe so close to the re that when conditions suddenly deteriorated, they had to ee before getting the line running. Some hose problems are unforeseeable: ice in the line, a bad hydrant, a severed standpipe. But getting water on a re also depends on the people who connect and position the hosethe decisions they make and the resources they have. Recent budget cuts give New Yorks engine companies fewer resources. When you lose water, says LaFemina, the veteran rescue chief that h man is big.

A QUESTION OF STAFFING

At one of the many rallies re unions held this spring as they faced the prospect of seeing 20 companies close, Uniformed Fire ghters Association president Steve Cassidy said, Fire ghter safety is really the most important job the department has. Its ensuring that every re ghter has the equipment and tools to do the job. When you talk about closing re companies, what youre really doing is increasing danger to re ghters. e closures never happened. But a subtler, still signi cant erosion of FDNYs manpower is already under way. For more than three decades, re ghters and the city have been arguing over how many re ghters are needed on an engine company. Should an o cer have four people or ve to position the engine, hook up to the hydrant, connect hose lengths, stretch the hose up to the re and control the application of water? In 1972 the union won a contract provision to put ve re ghters on all engines. e city reneged on this deal when the

scal crisis hit, putting the h man on Some of New Yorks recent losses, from only about a h of the citys engine. As top: John Bellew, res increased over the late 1970s, more Richard Sclafani, engines were given a h re ghter but Daniel Pujdak, Howard Carpluk, still short of the 1972 contract requirement. Michael Reilly and e re ghters union sued over the issue Thomas Brick. in 1983, and the dispute triggered several contract battles in the late 1980s. In 1995 a settlement extended ve- re ghter engines and linked the sta ng increase to guaranteed overtime for re ghters. e number of ve-person crews increased again in 1997 and in 2005. But then the FDNY began moving to reduce the headcount on engines. The re ghters contract linked sta ng levels to the amount of medical leave. Controlling medical leave is an enormous problem, recalls then-commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. Because their job involves a daily injury risk, firefighters get a generous amount WHERES THE FIRE of medical leave, Borough-by-borough statistics during which their www.citylimits.org/re earnings are taxfree and many collect disability insurance payouts as well. eir absence rateabout 7.8 percent in 2010is signi cantly higher than other city employees. To control this, the contract speci ed that if medical leave went above a certain threshold, the city could reduce sta ng on engines. e city moved in 2009 moved to reduce 49 companies back to four re ghters. In late 2010 it aimed for and won the reduction for all 60 remaining ve- re ghter engine companies, saving the department $20 million a year. At a May budget hearing, FDNY commissioner Salvatore Cassano was asked if the transition to a citywide policy of only four re ghters per engine has made an impact on safety. He insisted it hasnt. Cassanos predecessor Scoppetta says the ve-versus-four debate is mainly about getting re ghters enough overtime. But in 1987 then-deputy chief Vincent Dunn conducted an uno cial test on Randalls Island to see how much longer it took a four- re ghter team than a ve- re ghter team to stretch a hose. Getting a hose to

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FDNY Deaths Per Decade

343

10

18

29
1880s

26
1890s

72

61

74

82

100

113

104 68 19 22
1990s

22
2000s SEPT. 11, 2001

1860s 1870s

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

EXCLUDING SEPTEMBER 11

the h oor took the four- re ghter team 10 minutes, 23 seconds. It took a ve- re ghter team just under six minutes. Going to the sixth oor took the smaller crew four minutes longer than it took the larger crew. Dunns test, Scoppetta said, was too limited. You really have to do a more controlled set of tests to see what the di erence is, he said. ere are many re departments that operate with three re ghters. While some re departments do operate three-person enginesHoustons doesnational standards call for at least four, which is what Chicago generally uses, and the National Fire Protection Administration has written that progressive re chiefs believe ve is the minimum. e FDNY never conducted a more rigorous duplication of Dunns test during Scoppettas eight years at its helm or at any time since 1987. New York re ghters insist that losing the h re ghter makes a huge di erence. Stretching a hose sounds simple to those of us whose hose operations consist of wetting down the tomatoes in the backyard. But, as Al Turi explains, its not easy. e hose is heavy. It gets snagged on things, he says. It seems simple, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to do it in a uid motion so it doesnt get kinked. And to do it fast. Indeed, FDNY policy implicitly admits the impact of the sta ng change by requiring that four- re ghter engine companies wait for a second engine before stretching a hose line. e department says this policy hasnt resulted in problems at res. But union o cials say the number of injuries to reghters is up 30 percent this year over last, despite a 5 percent

decrease in the number of structural res. e re goes how the rst line goes. If the rst line is stretched properly, were probably going to have a good re operation, Salka told his podcast interviewer. In New York City, you might have a bunch of people piling into a building without a hose line because they know they have two or three engine companies behind them. Short of that, youd be out of your mind not to have a hose line with you. Dunn worries that the e ectiveness of protective equipment like bunker gear is permitting the FDNY to separate the traditionally close partnership between engine and ladder companies. Today re ghters are being trained to search and vent re areas before the hose line is ready to operate and extinguish ame. is is dangerous and was not done years ago when we did not have masks or good re equipment. Back then it was not physically possible to enter the re areas that re ghters enter today, Dunn says. is search and venting can sometimes cause ashover, wind-driven re, and cause re ghters to become caught and trapped by re, smoke and heat. is is a deadly trend in many re departments. e lieutenant notes that losing the h re ghter, along with other manpower shortages at the FDNY, a ects ladder companies as well. If a four- re ghter engine has a member call in sick, its brother ladder company might have to lose a person to ll in the engine. at person is generally the outside vent or OV re ghter, who is supposed to go to the back of the building to search for re and victims while the o cer

goes through the front. Were supposed to do an opposite attack, the lieutenant says. When the engine takes the OV, that cant occur. is happens a couple times a week, Id say.

LESSONS LEARNED?

e FDNY has clearly made changes in several areas where death investigations exposed problems. (Perhaps the most egregious failing over the past two decades was the nding a er Fowlers 1999 death that at that time there was no departmental policy on how to remove a downed re ghter. at has certainly changed.) Expensive bunker gear was purchased a er the three 1994 Watts Street deaths. Safety ropes were returned to service a er the East 178th Street deaths. At Sclafanis death, it was found that thered been no way to provide him with oxygen once his own air tank was depleted. By the time Carpluk was in distress a year later, the FastPakan oxygen tank that a re ghter can use on a colleague who is trappedwas available and used. e FDNY also came up with a better method for getting a downed re ghter out of a basement (basically using his air tank harness as a drag rescue device). Fire ghting tracking technology has been improved, albeit slowly. We havent had a re ghter fatality in three years. ats pretty good, and thats because of the changes a er 9/11, says LaFemina. e technology, the training, the equipment is the best its ever been. Other issues, however, might persist. We wont know for sure if communications problems have been fixed until

another situation in which re ghters face danger and send Maydays. Bunker gear is still very heavy. Finding out which buildings have been altered in a way that increases their risk to re ghters depends on how e ective is the citys inspection regime, which faces logistical and legal barriers. And to whatever extent manpower a ects FDNY safety, those risks will persist. e FDNY is already down at least 300 re ghters thanks to the hiring discrimination case, and it will be 15 months before any new re ghters arrive; meanwhile, older members will continue to retire at a steady pace. No o cials speak of it now, but as scal pressures continue, the city could move toward removing the h re ghter from ladder companies, just as they were removed from engine companies. In implementing lessons learned at its two most dramatic recent tragedies9/11 and the Deutsche Bank rethe FDNY ramped up training and building inspections, both good things on their face. But re companies are nowadays frequently unavailable to respond to res because they are training or inspecting. In a 24-hour period from July 11 to July 12, 32 re companies were closed at some point for training, medical exams or apparatus repairs. ree others were relocated to neighborhoods where the local re companies were, for some reason, unable to respond. For the third time in as many years, this year re unions beat back a Bloomberg bid to close 20 re companies. But while a bid to shutter re companies will always generate political opposition, a slower shrinkage of the re department through attrition ies under the radar even as it raises similar problems.

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Justifying a larger re department is di cult when the number of res and civilian re deaths are at historic lows. But while the number of res is down overall, the number of more serious res uctuates more unpredictably. And busy re companies still handle an impressive workload. In 2009, the 25 busiest engine companies each saw more than 3,100 working res and more than 300 res in occupied buildings.

UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS

e FDNYs death investigations themselves have improved markedly over the years, thanks mainly to the departments nally installing recording devices in chiefs cars to capture radio transmissions, something that had been recommended a er res in 1994, 1999 and 2001 and nally implemented by the time of the Meyran and Bellew tragedy in 2005. e more thorough fatality reports, however, o er mixed comfort to the families touched by those losses. I de nitely wanted to know what happened, Ramona Fowler says of her husbands death. So she read the FDNY report. Yes, it satis es your questions, but youre not satis ed. I dont think any widow was satis ed. e couples children, now in their late 20s and 30s, are proud that a public school (the P.S.

108 Captain Vincent J. Fowler School is in Jamaica, Queens), but have never read the report. June 4 is still a very di cult day for the Fowler family. Its amazing, because its 12 years later, but some days, its like a boulder is put on your chest. Denise Ford received the FDNY report on the Fathers Day disaster that claimed her husband, Harry, but says she has not looked at it with any care. A er all, it took her ve years just to open the box that contained the contents of her husbands locker. I think theres always questions in my mind. Why? I dont know if Ill ever feel comfort. Its painful to think about how he died and that he did die. Maura Leners father was a re ghter, and hes the one who talked George Lener, a trained plumber, into joining the job, using the standard sales pitch of steady work, medical coverage and a pension. But Lener soon fell in love with the gig. He planned to retire as a deputy chief. e couples three children, now in their 20s, have shown no interest in re ghting since losing their father, much to Maura Leners relief. George died 17 years ago this Juneor, to his widow, yesterday. I know they say time heals all wounds, she says. ats not true.

Above: A shrine in the Meyran home to Lt. Curtis Meyran. Opposite: The building on 178th Street in the Bronx where Meyan and Bellew died. and water woes contributed to the disaster.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Risks Versus Reward

Decisions in a blink, lives in the balance
In June, members of the citys re unions protested plans to close 20 rehouses. The headline-making cuts were avoided, but less-heralded budget reductions could make an impact.

n a publication o ering recruitment advice to re departments, the National Fire Protection Association lists 13 attributes that the job of re ghting requires. Most are physicalthe ability to climb a lot of stairs, lug a lot of gear, move heavy hoses around, rescue large people and the like. But one goes to whats under the helmet. A re ghter, says the NFPA, must be capable of critical, time-sensitive, complex problem solving during physical exertion in stressful, hazardous environments (including hot, dark, tightly enclosed spaces), further aggravated by fatigue, ashing lights, sirens, and other distractions. Even if a re department had all the best equipment and all the right tactics for every possible situation, and all the person-power it could possibly need, re ghters could still die. Indeed, in many cases, res dont kill re ghters and equipment doesnt save them. Decisions do.

WERE NOT DAREDEVILS

Some of those decisions are made by individual re ghters. ere is a narrow middle ground between being unwilling and being too willing to risk ones life, and re departments survive on personnel treading that border very carefully. Civilians cannot a ord to have re ghters who are too careful; otherwise theyd never risk coming through smoke and re to save you. But re ghters can be harmed by what the FDNY probe of Deutsche Bank called a can-do attitude. e can do attitude, the report reads, has enabled the FDNY to protect life and property at a superior level of excellence since the Fire Departments inception. But, the report continues, the attitude can also lead re ghters to take unnecessary risks. Retired FDNY lieutenant Steve Mormino recalls a chief who once told him that the problem with re ghters wasnt getting

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Diversity and the department

Lawsuits and slow progress
of Latinos passingbut among those who passed, blacks and Hispanics tended to be ranked lower than whites, so that of the 5,300 reghters hired from both exams, only 184 were black and 461 Latino. In 2010, federal Judge Nicholas Garaus ruled that the 1999 and 2003 exams had illegally discriminated, because they had an obvious disparate impact on minorities and because the city hadin the judges viewnot demonstrated a rm link between the test and the actual requirements of a reghters job. After a stepped-up recruitment campaign, a far higher number of blacks and Hispanics took the most recent FDNY test in 2007, and minorities made up a third of those whose scores were high enough to make hiring likely. The number of women who passed increased by half. But Garaus said that test was also poorly designed and stopped the city from using its results. The two sides recently agreed that a new reghter test will be given later this year, but they still need to come together on the test questions. Wilson took her exam in 1992 but wasnt hired until seven years later. When she graduated from the fire academy and began at her rst rehouse, It wasnt bad, she says. They didnt treat me bad. I think they were kind of afraid of me as well as me being afraid of them. A recent report by the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services estimated that on the basis of the number of women in other blue-collar professions, in the absence of discrimination, 17 percent of reghters would be women. Wilson
continued on page 54

Angela Meyran wears her late fathers facepiece.

Fireghter Regina Wilson anked by then-FDNY Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta and Mayor Bloomberg at a 2007 event. Photo courtesy FDNY.

Fireghter Wilson is the senior man at Engine 219 in Brooklyn. So, at a fire, Wilson handles the nozzlea tough job for any member of the FDNY. But Fireghter Wilson is not like most FDNY members, because Fireghter Wilson is not a man. So, unlike her male colleagues, if the facepiece on her breathing apparatus breaks, the spare units that battalion chiefs carry are unlikely to t her smaller face. As a black woman, 12-year FDNY veteran Regina Wilson embodies two separate, decades-old and ongoing battles over how the re department is staffed. In the early 1970s, black reghters went to federal court claiming that the FDNYs hiring practices illegally discriminated on the basis of race. They won, forcing the FDNY to use a strict 3-to-1, white-to-minority hiring ratio for several years. Later that decade, women who wanted to ght res sued over the departments physical screening. They won too. After the latter court ruling, the city

changed its physical test and hired 41 female reghters. But now there are only 29 women among the 11,000 people who wear FDNY uniformsa fraction of 1 percent. By comparison, in Tuscaloosa, Ala., 24 percent of the re department is female. Meanwhile, the presence of racial and ethnic minorities in the FDNYin 2007 about 3.4 percent of reghters were black and 6.7 percent Latino lags behind other cities, like Los Angeles, where the LAFD is 30 percent Latino, and Chicago, whose reghting force is 20 percent black. The Vulcan Association of black reghters sued the city in 2007 alleging that the written exams used by the FDNY in 1999 and 2003 discriminated against blacks and Latinos. Ninety percent of whites passed the 99 test, compared with 60 percent of blacks and 77 percent of Latinos. The numbers improved dramatically with the 2003 test, with 97 percent of whites, 85 percent of blacks and 93 percent

them into a burning building; it was getting them out. We pride ourselves on that, Mormino says. We know that were a last line of defense for someone. Were constantly trained on that. To know that someones survival depends on you is one of our biggest motivating factors. I dont know how to curtail that. Plus, theres a part of it that is not conscious. Sometimes at a re, he says, you get tunnel vision. Youre just not aware of everything thats going on around you. e re department says it is trying to change re ghters approach to risks by making videos of safety tips available to re ghters, scheduling presentations and discussions about safety at rehouses, and encouraging FDNY members to participate in the Near Miss program and Pass It On project, in which re ghters share safety information and stories of close calls. ere are signs the culture is changing. e stigma around issuing Maydays has largely disappeared, re ghters say. More people are using their breathing equipment more o en. Were not daredevils, says the second re lieutenant we spoke to. We dont want to die.

FDNY GUYS GO IN

In December 1999, the re department in Worcester, Mass., responded to a blaze in an abandoned industrial building

called the Cold Storage Warehouse. ere were reports of squatters living inside, so re ghters mounted a search as the ames grew. Six men from three di erent re units became lost inside. eir radio transmissions are still chilling. Get people up on this oor now or we are going to die! We have no air, and we cannot breathe, one man called. Other re ghters fought through heat and ames to try to signal the way out, but the re drove them back. Finally, the chief in charge, Mike McNamee, ordered the building evacuated. He physically barred the door to prevent other re ghters from obeying their fundamental instincts and running in. He cut his losses. While re ghters make choices that risk or save their own lives, re o cers make decisions that a ect the safety of dozens of people. ose decisions naturally come under the microscope when a re ghter dies. Some decisions, you can establish a commission, pose a question, says Al Hagan, the FDNY captain who leads the union that represents chiefs and other o cers. A er six months or a year, you come up with a decision. Fire ground commanders are not a orded that luxury. We make those decisions in a blink. It all happens at a subconscious level, and it happens very quickly. You search your mental Rolodex for the closest match [of earlier res] and you say, What was done? How did it turn out?

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continued from page 52

would settle for 500, or even 100, at the FDNY but adds, In my time on the job we might not even see the original 41. The ght over women in reghting focused on the physical test, which a court found unreasonably emphasized brute strength over endurance. Changes to the test since then have stirred resentment among some male firefighters that the physical testwhich consists of a timed series of tasks related to reghting, like lifting ladders and dragging hosehas been made too easy. The questions of racial disparities, on the other hand, concern the 85-question multiple-choice written test that FDNY candidates take. Critics say a written test is a poor method for selecting reghters. You really cant measure whos going to do well on [reghting] with a pencil-and-paper test that happens in a nice sort-of classroom, the Vulcans lawyer, Shayana Kadidal, said in a 2009 television interview. By and large, reghting has been a sort of an apprentice kind of job over the years, something where you learn how to do it on the job. Over the past decade, the department has reduced the eligibility requirements for the test. You used to need a year of college [to take the exam] , says former FDNY commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. Now you need six months of gainful employment. You could be bagging groceries. Critics claim the 1999 and 2003 tests beneted those who have some knowledge of reghting, perhaps from a father or uncle. The city denies that the past exams tested anything other than common sense. The reason for the racial disparity, the city argues, is that different groups of people perform at different levels on tests. There is some evidence to support that contention: Nationwide on the math section of SATs taken by college seniors in 2008, Asians scored an average of 44 points higher than whites, and whites scored

109 points higher than blacks. The disparities on the SAT and the FDNY exam could reect differences in the quality of high schools that different groups are likely to have attended, or cultural skews in the exams themselves. But according to Garaus ruling, the city also cut a lot of corners in preparing its exams. For instance, as it drew up the 2007 exam, the citys testmakers asked a panel of reghters to evaluate how well they thought the questions related to the job. There were many calls for changes. The city ignored them. Paul Mannix, a deputy chief with 23 years on the re department, leads a group called Merit Matters that has resisted what it says is a watering down of the reghter entrance exams that sacrices competence. Hes worried that the upcoming test, which might be administered by computer, will allow people with inadequate reading comprehension to pass the test. Reading is a key part of the reghters job, he says, from deciphering the printouts that provide emergency assignments to keeping up on tactics and safety bulletins. You have to read our books and learn our procedures, he says. You cant possibly teach somebody all the things that have to be learned. Mannix admits that, as Garaufis ruled, the city made mistakes in crafting the 2007 test but doesnt think those who passed the test should be penalized for them. Asked whether the alleged lowering of test standards from 1999 onward meant that today there are mentally or physically unqualied people in New Yorks rehouses, Mannix replies, I cant say that with any certainty. But it is a recipe for disaster. Not all reghters of color agree with the approach taken by the Vulcans. FDNY Hispanic Society head Lt. G. Ricco Diaz has been on the force since 1984 and has heard his share of ethnic slurs. He recalls the time a Latino woman eyed Diaz as she walked past the rehouse. Aint it great to be a

Puerto Rican with a job? You get a lot of ass, man, a fellow reghter told him. Its different now. They cant say, Niggers want the job or Spics want it, so they say they. But Diazs group has eschewed the litigation approach because, he says, claims of discrimination discourage young Latinos from applying to the department. The presence of minorities in the FDNY is increasing, albeit slowly. The FDNY conducted 5,000 outreach events in 2010 promoting the 2011 test; among those who lled out expression-of-interest forms at those events, 35 percent were black and 28 percent were Latino. The one academy class taken from the 2007 list (before the judge shut that list down) was 35 percent minority, the highest rate in city history. The fact is, Diaz says, reghting is a father-son job. As more Hispanics and blacks enter the FDNY and rise through the ranks, more young minorities will identify reghting as a viable career path. But it will be a slow process in a city that is increasingly majority-minority. Paul Washington, an FDNY captain and past president of the Vulcan Society, said in a 2009 television interview that the fact that his dad was a reghter was a major help to his own effort to join the department. Theres no question thats an advantage, and its an advantage that very few blacks and Hispanics enjoy, he said. For Diaz, this is as complex as it is personal. A dear friend of his was among the 343 lost on Sept. 11. A Latino, the man had been hired in the years after the Vulcans 1973 court victory. Diaz recalls being among the sea of blue uniforms that spilled out of St. Patricks Cathedral as his friends funeral ended. Im leaving, and I still heard a guy say, Yeah, but he was one of those 3-to-1 guys. That was devastating to me. Even after 9/11, you still wont treat him as an equal? I dont want that for the following generations of reghters to come.

Lt. John Clancy died in a 1995 re when a oor collapsed beneath him.

e o cer in charge at a re makes a risk-versus-reward assessment to determine how much danger he should expose his re ghters to. Its a complex, multivariate calculation: Are there civilians in danger? Can they be saved or, like those victims trapped above the oors of impact on Sept. 11, are they doomed? Does the likelihood of saving them outweigh the risk that rescuers would take in the attempt? How close do we get to the re before its threat to us exceeds the advantages of ghting the blaze at close range? One of the key decisions an incident commander makes, says NIOSHs Tim Merinar, is how aggressively you want to ght an individual re. e FDNY prides itself on weighting its risk-reward calculus toward aggressive, interior re ghting. You have to put it in the context of the culture of the FDNY. ey are very aggressive, says former re commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. ere are re departments in the world that sort of ght res from the outside. But if there is any indication that there are people inside the building, FDNY guys go in. And there is more than machismo behind that approach. In a dense, urban

environment, playing it safe and ghting a re from the outside means exposing nearby buildings to re risk, accepting that families will be made homeless and setting neighborhoods up for the social impact that burnt-out buildings can have. Its not an easy choice. Since Sept. 11, the FDNY has increased training for safety investigators and developed an annual risk management plan that assesses the possibility of death or injury and recommends changes. Injury reports have been computerized to allow lessons to be extracted. e department is also participating in what FDNY documents describe as a national, multi-year academic research project to develop a world-class safety management system. But NIOSH investigators have suggested a er several recent fatal res that the FDNYs risk-reward decisions could use a rethink. In the wake of omas Bricks 2003 death at a furniture warehouse, NIOSH found that re commanders should conduct a risk-versus-gain analysis prior to committing re ghters to an interior operation, and continue to assess riskversus-gain throughout the operation. e death of Richard

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Denise Ford, whose husband Harry was killed in the Fathers Day explosion and collapse in Queens, which also claimed the lives of John Downing and Brian Fahey.

Sclafani in 2005 was in part blamed on an incomplete initial size-up by an o cer. A lesson from the 2006 store collapse that killed Howard Carpluk and Michael Reilly was, in NIOSHs view, that o cers must consider the live load of water on the structure and go defensive when water load potentially compromises the structural integrity. ere are mistakes at every re, says Hagan. At res like Sept. 11 and Deutsche Bank, were there glaring errors that led to deaths? No, he contends. We make more rescues than we have deaths. In an urban area, if we step back and go, Well, someone could get hurt here Someone could get hurt here? en get rid of the re department. I am very proud that our overarching strategy is one of interior, aggressive attack. Frank Gribbon, the FDNY spokesman, says the departments approach is constantly evolving. When he joined the department 22 years ago, not every re ghter had a radio, the helmets were made of leather and the protective jacket was canvas. All that has changed. But the FDNYs general approach to res has not. I think weve become smarter with that strategy over the years, sometimes having learned tough lessons at some res where weve had deaths, but there is no shi on the horizon in terms of not being an aggressive re ghting force, Gribbon says. is is what we do, we do it very well, and were doing it better than we ever have before. FDNY commanders, Gribbon adds, are taught to risk a lot to save a lot and risk a little to save a little. A life that can be saved is worth a lot of risk to re ghters. When theres risk to property, then were going to risk little, he says. At least six of the 11 FDNY members who have died since Sept. 11 perished in an e ort to save buildings in which there were no people. at is something we know in hindsight. Its a dangerous business, Scoppetta reminds us. It calls for immediate response to changing conditions. You can secondguess, I suppose, anybodys actions in a situation like that.

FINDING THE COURAGE

e National Fallen Fire ghters Foundations Everyone Goes Home program says in its literature: Fire ghters must have the courage to face a multitude of risks in order to save lives and protect their communities. A di erent type of courage is required to stay safe in potentially dangerous situations, avoiding needless risks and tragic consequences. e FDNY has the rst kind of courage in spades. On the second, there has been progress. ere was a time in the 1960s when the FDNY didnt even issue gloves to its members. When Mormino started at the FDNY in 1987, the department had just moved to prohibit re ghters from riding on the back step of their truck or engine. Fire ghters die much less o en in New York than they used tothanks to the decreasing number of res and evolving safety attitudes. Were learning a little about a better way to do things, says Mormino. Elsewhere across the U.S., the re ghter death rate appears to be falling. But theres still a way to go, for the FDNY and

other U.S. re departments. Over the past decade, the country of England (one of four countries in the UK, with a population of 51 million) lost 23 re ghters, compared with 1,091 in America. From 2000 through 2010, London lost two re ghters in operations. New York City buried 11. We do not want them to change their attitudes toward aggressive re ghting tactics, Gerry Tracey, the retired chief who is pushing the FDNY to adopt new methods for dealing with wind-driven res, says of the departments o cer class. What we want to be able to do is to educate them as best we can to make educated decisions based on an understanding of risk. Tracey is one of many who argue that despite the decrease in res, the re ground is more dangerous now than ever. Interviewed at a Queens diner, he li s up his plastic-encased laptop computer. is is gasoline in a solid state, he says. We point around the room at the other plastic items. We note the tightly sealed windows, seen in many buildings, which allow ammable gases to build up to the point where they ash over into a killer reball. So the challenge is much greater today. REMEMBERING Like most threats, that of fire is born Images of FDNY memorials unequally, by re ghtwww.citylimits.org/re ers and victims. Fires are still one of the leading causes of accidental death in America, but some people are far more likely than others to die in res: the old more than the young, men more than women, the poor more than the rich. Black people are twice as likely as whites to die in res. Black children are three times more likely than white kids to be killed in a blaze. e safety of re ghters matters to potential re victims because, in a sense, when your life is at risk, you are only as safe as your rescuer. At the re on Watts Street in 1994, ames exploded from the re apartment on the oor below, billowing up onto the landing where Capt. John Drennan and Fire ghters Christopher Siedenburg and James Young were standing. e three were subjected to severe heat for ve to seven minutes. Young died at the scene. Siedenburg died the next day. Drennan survived for 40 days, then succumbed. His widow, Vina, dedicated her life to saving others who ght res. In 2004 she addressed re departments across the country in an online commentary: We are called by something deep inside to want to make a di erence. We must rethink this dangerous job of re ghting. We must nd ways to circumvent the old ways and old bureaucracies that see a death as an inevitable part of this job. We here can nd the courage to say, Enough. Havent we su ered enough to question charging into the mouth of hell? Are our heads so afraid of change that it has stunted our hearts? Lets challenge the re service to have zero tolerance for a line-of-duty death. Its time to question. No re ghter should die doing this job in America.

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Engine 24 in the West Village. While the number of structural res has decreased in New York, busy re companies still make 4,000 runs and deal with 3,000 or more working res a year.

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e following members of the Fire Department have died in service to New York City:
1865 FF Robert Wintringham FF George
Bell FF Thomas Irvin FF Dominick Sicot 1866 FF Peter H. Walsh Capt. David Waters 1867 FF Miles L. Swoarby 1868 Capt. Michael Snyder 1869 Capt. James Whalen Lt. omas Roberts 1870 FF Mathais Hewes 1871 FF Jacob Edler 1872 FF Edward Burke FF Jacob Steiger 1873 AE George A. Erlacher FF James Plunket 1874 FF John ONeill 1875 FF Williams Hughes FF Phillip J. Maus BC William H. Nash 1876 FF David Clute FF David Muldrew Lt. John H. Bush 1877 FF Joseph Williams 1878 FF Charles J. Connolly 1879 FF John W. Irving FF John Reilly FF Henry C. Mount 1880 FF Patrick Clark Capt. William Baldwin FF John ORourke FF John F. Cassidy FF Thomas J. Dougherty FF Phillip Holton FF Thomas L. Jacobus 1882 FF William Krattinger FF David McBride Capt. Charles Keagan FF Michael Conners 1883 FF Edward Vincelette FF Robert McDougall 1884 FF George

W. Haight Lt. Jonathan Tyack FF Joshua A. Wallace 1885 FF James P. Smith FF Thomas Dunleavy FF John Ennis 1886 FF Dennis McGee FF William Hobung BC Francis Mahedy 1887 FF Francis J. Quinn FF James C. OShaunessy Eng. William Wray FF James Rehill 1888 FF Michael J. Nolan 1889 FF Charles McHugh FF Samuel McMahon 1890 FF Charles S. Morris FF William J. Chin Eng. John Bulgar 1891 Lt. James H. Shute FF Hugh McGowan 1892 FF Thomas R. Godfrey FF Francis Reilly FF Wayland A. Estes FF John F. Spaulding 1893 Capt. Lawrence Murphy 1894 FF John Banks FF Edward F. Dunn BC John J. Bresnan Lt. John L. Rooney 1895 FF Peter McKeon FF Patrick Conlin 1896 FF Edward Walsh BC William Shaw FF John F. Hickey FF Alfred Bauman FF Hugh Fox 1897 FF John G. Reinhardt FF Martin J. Oakley Eng. John Callaghan FF James F. Calnan 1898 FF Pierce English 1900 Capt. Edwin H. Tobin FF Peter F. Bowen Capt. John J. Grady FF William J. Smith FF Daniel F. Mullen FF Michael Emmett Capt. Mathew Fohey 1901 FF Frank Featherston FF Mortimer A. Roberts FF John Geary FF Christopher Boines FF James E. Nugent FF William Ryan 1902 FF omas J. Cooney FF Patrick J. Quail FF James Dawe BC Thomas A. Coppinger Lt. William F. Jeery FF Michael J. OToole 1903 FF James G. Corbett Capt. John T. Andariese FF William McNally FF John J. Sullivan BC Martin M. Coleman FF Richard J. Joyce 1904 Lt. George Gibson FF Christopher Dressel FF Arthur J. Rank FF Peter J. Gaeney Eng. Mark A. Kelly FF Hugh F. Arragoni FF John J. Crean FF Thomas F. Madigan FF James W. Gerdes FF Peter S. Clark FF Patrick Lennon 1905 Capt. James L. Haviland Lt. George F. McGeary FF William Brown FF Samuel Lilly Capt. William J. Weiland FF John Carbush FF William J. Dayton Lt. Daniel J. Sheehan 1906 FF George B. F. Christman FF Thomas F. Halpin, Jr. FF Dennis J. Healy Capt. John F. Walsh FF James W. McCusker Eng. William H. Rush FF Joseph Finger 1907 FF Daniel J. Campbell FF Thomas F. Lennon FF Thomas McNamara FF Harry F. Baker FF Adam Damm Capt. John Ryan FF Frederick Masserli FF James Smith FF Edward D. Lahey FF John J. Carey FF Charles E. Parks 1908 FF George A. OConnor 1908 FF Thomas F. Phillips FF Matthew Miller FF Thomas P. Eglinton

FF John J. McConnell Dccharles A. Kruger FF Henry Hanson 1909 BC Michael E. C. Graham FF Charles E. Meadows FF Francis V.A. Maher 1910 Lt. Frederick Schultz FF Joseph H. White FF John F. Fecher FF James F. Barrett FF Timothy Cotter FF William F. Healey FF Daniel A. Hart 1911 FF Anton Jiranek FF Leo Hackbarth FF Stephen T. Ray, Jr. BC William Devlin Capt. James A. Hagen Lt. John F. Timmons 1912 BC William J. Walsh FF George Farrell FF Henry J. Kaiser BC John Rush FF William F. Stanton FF William Maurer Capt. Charles Bass 1913 BC William J. Duy FF Brereton E. Johnson Eng. John B. Barget FF Jeremiah Leoney Lt. Thomas Mitchell FF Thomas J. McManus 1914 FF John B. Doran 1915 FF James W. ompson FF John Duy FF Michael D. Curtin FF Mathew J. Ward 1916 FF Ignatius F. Neusch FF James J. Skelly Jr. FF Raphael A. Fox 1917 FF Christian L. Walter Capt. Thomas F. Kearns FF Patrick OConnor FF Harry E. Flynn 1918 FF John J. Frein FF James Casey Lt. Charles J. Murphy FF John W.T.F. Kocher FF Michael Wall FF Francis R. Twomey FF Henry Oltmann FF Henry J. Helmken FF Charles J. Johnson FF John J. Kelly, Jr. BC Matthew J. Cummings FF Benjamin H. Fay Capt. Joseph Fitzgerald 1919 FF Charles Snyder FF George J. Scanlon FF Joseph G. Schmitt FF Fred Fempel FF William E. Schalle FF Alfred J. Kundie FF Patrick J. Lee Capt. Edward F. Nealis FF Charles B. Franssen FF Joseph McDonough 1920 FF Thomas F. Brennan FF Michael Karkel FF James Brennan FF Frank Callmeyer FF James J. Hughes Capt. Samuel Brown FF Harry Wilson FF Denis Donovan FF Stephen J. Finn FF John Keupp 1921 FF Joseph A. Flanagan FF Thomas Behan FF William F. Selluiger 1922 Lt. James T. Brown FF Thomas D. Hassett FF Henry P. Reinhardt FF Frederick G. Brandt FF James V. ODonnell FF Emmet F. Donnelly FF Adrian Curnen FF James H. Malone Lt. John J. Schoppmeyer FF Louis J. Farrell 1923 FF John F. Dunne FF Michael E. Hanley Lt. James Grin FF William J. Aeillo FF Julius Spanier FF Raymond F. Farrell FF James J. Sullivan 1924 Lt. Albert E. Donovan Capt. James Shaw FF Thomas J. Connolly FF William Leichsenring FF James J. McCormack FF James J. Murphy Capt. James R. Starkey 1925 AC Joseph Crawley Lt. William Fletcher BC Michael

A memento in Denise Fords house. The losses on Sept. 11 were the heaviest toll ever suffered by an American rescue agency.

F. Harley FF John E. Miller FF Patrick Daly 1926 FF William L. Moran FF James ODwyer FF Charles R. Nagle FF Christopher Quinn DC John OHara 1927 FF Edward J. Fox FF John M. Grane FF Joseph A. Heslin Capt. John S. Roberts FF Steve A. Williamson FF Peter Parks FF Henry Holster FF Michael J. Cunningham FF Edward J. Knapp FF William Carlock FF George E. Walker Capt. David M. Lynch FF Bernard OKane 1928 FF John Dwyer FF Bernard J. Reilly Capt. George C. Strauss FF John J. Donohue FF Jacob G. Gulde FF John E. Rauch FF Harry Schumann 1929 FF William H. Kelly Lt. John Mayer FF Louis Lubcker FF James H. Murphy Lt. Timothy E. Coughlin FF William Vogel FF John J. Henderson 1930 P John J. Harvey Capt. Charles H. Furey FF Henry J. Hoehn FF Frank C. Murray Lt. James A. OBrien FF John J. Whelan FF Joseph Sullivan FF Francis M. Donelon Capt. Edward A. Dougherty DC Bernardo F. Carlock 1931 Lt. Thomas F. Kain FF George L. Byrne FF John Degnan BC John J. Dooley FF William Ormsby FF Mathew J. Dunn 1932 Lt. William Kostinec Jr. Capt. Matthew Lynch Capt. Frederick J. Trefcer FF Charles G. Rappe FF Joseph Lagrange Lt. James ODonnell FF Thaddius Connolly Lt. John H. Cosgrove FF Peter A. Daly FF Thomas S. Finn FF James F. Greene FF Louis Hardina Lt. James Hartnett FF William L. Pratt FF Edward R. Maloney FF Wellington Hackett DC John

Flood 1933 FF John V. Logan FF Ferdinand Riviello FF John V. Storch Jr. FF John J. Feeley Lt. John W. Smith FF Patrick Maloney 1934 Lt. Thomas A. Bowler FF Joseph P. Ahern FF Frederick V. Erb BC John A. Slowey 1935 FF Cornelius Healy Lt. John H. Seeman FF George W. Sampson Capt. William J. Head FF Ernest Mattes FF John Carroll FF Raymond M. Sands FF Michael F. Logan 1936 FF Charles Schoener FF Joseph A. Scanlon FF Joseph Dunn FF William S. Neville 1937 FF Joseph T. Fosse FF Michael J. Mulvey FF Fred Gerner FF Peter J. Harmon FF Joseph McNamara Lt. John Durkin 1938 FF Harry J. Kett Lt. Thomas Meehan FF James F. Hughes Capt. Joseph Tracy Lt. Christopher J. Plunkett Lt. Patrick McKeon FF Thomas J. Hitter FF John J. Jakoby FF Thomas H. Barragry 1939 FF Andrew B. George FF Ceasar J. Macari FF Charles R. Wills FF James A. Hagan FF John J. Lyons FF William E. Lehmann FF Joseph McCarthy Capt. Phillip W. Hublitz FF John J. Finley FF Gerald T. Hanley FF Henry C. Foster Lt. John E. Murphy 1940 FF John P. Schwintek FF James J. Steakem FF Patrick Devlin DC James Tubridy FF Charles Stenvall Jr. 1941 FF Harold A. Barker FF William J. Driscoll Lt. Benjamin Parcell Capt. Daniel Murphy FF Thomas J. Osborn FF Carl H. Bischo FF Robert Mahl FF Bertram Butler Capt. Walter Sandberg 1942 FF Raymond Cosgrove Lt. Thomas Blackburne FF John C. Huggins

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 Lt. Robert E. Rummel 1951 Lt. Robert C. Davidson FF Arthur C. Smith FF James Roche FF Bernard Delmar FF Frank E. Wolf 1952 Lt. William Munda Capt. William J. Brady FF Bernard E. Meaney FF Thomas W. Cokeley BC John M. J. McGowan FF Denis J. Corridan FF David J. OKeefe FF Richard C. Therkorn FF Emanuel Adler Lt. Packey Radigan FF Antonio J. Assante 1953 Div.C. Terrance P. Conaty Lt. Louis W. Finger FF Andrew L. Milyko FF Julius Feldman FF Daniel A. Weisse Eng. John D. McKean FF James J. Moran FF Thomas J. Farrell FF Garrett W. Langdon FF Harry J. Smith, Jr. FF Joseph T. Mannino 1954 FF William Kot FF Edward J. Curtin BC Edward C. Huber FF Joseph Delong FF Joseph P. Dugan FF Samuel A. Schiller FF Daniel Sullivan FF John P. Hamilton BC James Byrne FF Eric R. Anderson 1955 Capt. omas Prior to Sept. 11, October 17, 1966 ranked as the deadliest day in FDNY history. On that date, Herlihy Lt. Joseph M. Oesau FF 12 reghters perished in a oor collapse at a store re on 23rd Street. Daniel A. Dunphy BC Eugene G. Dowd FF Frank A. Kober Capt. William L. Casey FF Arnold N. Hafner FF FF Edward J. Klimas 1943 FF Patrick OKeefe FF Eugene F. Kelly Andrew K. Wright FF Fred L. Cumming Lt. Thomas R. Dore FF George Schmitt FF Robert W. Lane FF Peter J. Dannhardt FF John J. Daly FF Peter J. Bradley BC Edward P. Scully FF Capt. James H. Savage FF Robert G. Gates FF James A. Dingee Vincent Laurence FF George C. Zapf FF James OKane FF FF C. Stephen Auditore FF Robert W. Johnston 1944 FF Joseph William B. Brown Capt. Vincent J. McGill 1956 FF James W. Kojac OFlaherty Capt. William F. Klauck FF Edward J. Nelson FF FF William Prechtel Capt. James A. Walsh Lt. William OSullivan Emile A. Steiner Lt. Harold J. Curran FF Bernard P. McGreavy FF Edward J. Carroll FF Arthur G. Hanson FF Fred J. Hellauer FF Howard V. Colbert FF Eugene F. Steens FF George H. FF William P. Hoolan FF Charles J. Infosino Lt. John F. Malloy Cridland Capt. Walter T. Clarke FF John J. Sheely FF Eugene Lt. Augustine Halley FF George J. Murphy Lt. Edward D. J. Studer FF James J. Hughes FF Robert C. Pettit 1945 Lt. Joseph McConnell FF Thomas F. Maher FF Ruby Naturman Capt. E. Joyce FF Vincent A. Schmitt FF Elbert Hardman FF Nelson Daniel T. Rice FF James P. Reilly FF Francis X. Casey FF WilL. Tuite FF John J. Russell FF Morris Graf FF Frank J. Winklarek liam McEvoy 1957 FF Peter G. Peila FF Anthony P. Longa BC BC Anthony Jireck FF Herman Staton FF George Nigro FF James G. Kesling FF Bernard Tully FF Matthew J. Belford Lt. James J. Ryan FF James J. Farrell FF George B. Weill FF Thomas Martin D. J. Kelly FF James E. McArdle Lt. Rodman G. Chrysler F. Shortell BC Charles Kohlenberger FF James R. Hickey FF FF Thomas J. Walters FF Michael Berenz Lt. Richard MacCave Stephen J. Butch FF Stephen J. Marangas FF Harold F. Holsten FF Joseph J. Tucker 1958 Lt. Timothy F. OLeary FF Richard FF John R. Sheridan FF Henry B. Innes FF Thomas F. Taylor Gelke FF Bernard Blumenthal FF William G. Schmidt Lt. FF Frank Fiederlein FF Charles A. Hickey Lt. Michael W. Stephen D. Rooney FF Paul C. Wrigley FF Frank J. Zatecky Tarpey FF James Costello FF William F. McNulty FF John W. FF Thomas Casey FF Vincent Janczewski FF Frederick E. Glasser Eiserman 1946 FF Walter A. Jensen FF George M. Williams FF 1959 Capt. Thomas P. Mulvaney FF Mathew F. Wieners FF Frank J. Molinari FF Edwin J. Hovey FF John W. Leary FF Charles Wilson Capt. Erick W. Thomas Lt. John J. Rober FF Michael J. Berkery FF James R. Gillis Lineman Harold F. Clan- Charles J. Boll FF Richard W. Schultz FF Ludwig A. Beckman dening FF William J. Wandling FF Frank Moorehead, Jr. FF Lt. Theodore F. Knote Lt. James Malloy FF Edward J. Campbell Daniel K. Krauss 1947 FF Winfield A. Walsh BC William P. Hogan Capt. Orestes Hantjiles Capt. Stephen Dyczko 1960 FF Ignatius FF Nathan Levine FF William D. Austin FF Frederick Ziegler V. Bell FF Paul R. Cady FF Michael Klein FF Martin J. McCor FF Jacob Bassman FF Howard E. Wynn FF James C. Farley mick FF Dennis McQueenie Lt. Thomas E. Fitzgerald FF 1948 FF John T. Rynn FF Joseph J. Brecht Lt. Harry G. Boyle Robert J. Denney FF John C. Cosner Lt. John J. McDermott Lt. Harry M. Maloney 1949 Lt. George P. Oates FF Lowell J. FF Francis J. Sammon Lt. Matthew A. Sheerin 1961 FF James A. McElroy FF Christopher E. A. McAuley FF Peter Farley BC Pinto FF John N. Crosthwaite BC Anthoney R. Martucci Capt. Gunther E. Beake FF Samuel R. Doherty Lt. John A. Lyden 1950 Walter C. Bersig FF Robert A. Meill FF William J. Bryan FF FF Peter Engel FF Michael Michelotti FF Walter W. Chadwick John J. Garrick FF Robert R. Hurst FF Charles G. Lang FF

John J. King 1962 Lt. Charles F. Hale Lt. Victor Prokop Lt. Michael J. Shields FF Bernard Goldman FF Leo J. J. Ray Lt. Luigi Bianca FF John Cannon FF Edward M. White Div.C. Frank J. Turner FF John C. Farragher DC P. Joseph Connelly FF Richard Andrews FF Francis X. Egan FF Richard P. Giord FF James F. Marino Capt. William F. Russell FF George J. Zahn FF James J. Ruane 1963 Lt. Frank W. Peckering Capt. Peter J. Brennan, Jr. FF Raymond R. Mayr FF James A. Rogers Lt. George R. Goger FF Eugene K. Byrne FF James J. Johnston FF William J. Hanlon 1964 FF Peter A. Cervini FF Martin Hanrahan FF Ernest J. Marquart FF Edwin C. Remhild FF Olin L. Blair Jr. 1965 FF Bartholomew V. Foley FF James F. Hipple Lt. Arthur Wagner Lt. Charles J. Franck 1st Dep. George F. Mand FF Edward F. Snediker Lt. Robert Niebling FF Fredrick M. Kubera 1966 FF Robert T. Smullen FF William H. OBrien FF Dominic Villano FF James E. Linekin FF John J. OKeefe FF William J. Farrell FF John G. Berry Lt. John J. Finley FF James V. Galanaugh BC Walter J. Higgins FF Joseph F. Kaminski FF Joseph Kelly FF Carl Lee FF William F. McCarron Lt. Joseph Priore DC Thomas A. Reilly FF Daniel L. Rey FF Bernard A. Tepper 1967 FF Lorenzo Warlick FF James S. Hosey Capt. John W. Smith BC Samuel H. Levine Lt. Dominick Marchesi FF James C. Kearney FF Carl Herer Lt. Michael O. Glynn FF Lawrence Perchuck Capt. Joseph A. Fay FF William P. Kelly 1968 DC Perry R. Peterson FF George P. Linnemann Capt. Thomas F. Munroe FF Charles J. Grieco Lt. Edmund A. McNulty Lt. Harry L. Miniter FF Phillip C. Smith FF George L. Collins Lt. Eugene R. Miller 1969 FF Lawrence Franklin FF James J. Maine FF Dominick J. Rosato FF Bernard P. McManus FF John F. Whelan FF Michael T. Carr 1970 FF Harold R. Nelson FF Carmelo J. Puccia Div.C. William Dusterwald Lt. John R. Eastburn Lt. Edward C. Hackett FF Edwards J. Ehlers Lt. James W. Connelly FF Edward J. Tuite FF Timothy J. Gray 1971 Lt. Jerome R. OConnor Capt. John T. Dunne FF Walter J. Bozenko Lt. Thomas P. Sheriden FF James P. Lavin FF Edward J. Heany BC William C. Rinsdale 1972 Lt. Joseph P. Connelly Lt. Francis J. Martin FF Henry H. Mitchell Lt. Herman G. Berny FF Peter J. Cusumano Lt. William C. Seelig 1973 Lt. Frank C. Smith FF John Clarke FF Joseph Johnson Jr. Lt. Frank J. Brennan Lt. Allen J. Sweet 1974 FF Fabin Echevarrieta FF Anthony W. Defalco Lt. Henry J. Hinton FF Harold J. Hoey FF Russell Linneball FF Johnnie Williams FF Daniel Perricone 1975 FF Edward Winewski Lt. Michael A. Maloney FF Adolph DAmbrosio FF James W. Robertson Capt. Raymond Koehler FF John Flannigan 1976 FF Charles Sanchez FF Joseph Kanavan Lt. Joseph M. Beetle FF Thomas J. Earl FF Stanley H. Skinner FF Richard B. Marsh FF Patrick J. Cleary Lt. Joseph Sparacino, Jr. FF William D. Prange 1977 FF Donald P. Aversa FF George E. Meenken Lt. Charles Hunt Capt. John J. Stelmack FF Martin R. Celic Lt. Lester A. Roselle 1978 FF Gerald T. Ganley FF Charles S. Bouton Lt. James E. Cutillo FF Harold F. Hastings FF James P. McManus FF William OConnor FF George S. Rice Lt. Robert Courtenay 1979 FF John T. Mckenna FF Walter Smith Jr. FF Joseph F. Zino FF Gerald D. Crowley BC James M. Meyers 1980 Lt. Robert R. Dolney FF Donald M. Bub FF Lawrence Fitzpatrick FF Gerald J. Frisby BC Frank T. Tuttlemondo 1981 FF Dennis M. Peterson 1982 FF Richard J. Smith Lt. Robert J. Cahill Capt. Alfred M.

Knecht Capt. Barry N. Brown 1983 FF William J. Ford 1984 FF Tony Shands FF Philip C. DAdamo 1985 Capt. James F. McDonnell 1986 FF Richard G. Sale 1987 Lt. Peter Canelli Lt. Joseph P. Faughan FF John J. Toomey 1989 FF John P. Devaney 1991 FF Alfred E. Ronaldson FF Kevin C. Kane 1992 Lt. omas A. Williams 1993 FF Arthur Tuck 1994 FF James F. Young FF Christopher Siedenburg Capt. John J. Drennan EMT Christopher Prescott Lt. George Lener Capt. Wayne E. Smith 1995 FF omas A. Wylie Lt. Raymond F. Schiebel FF Peter F. McLoughlin Lt. John M. Clancy 1996 FF James B. Williams FF Louis Valentino 1997 EMT Tracy Allen Lee 1998 FF Raymond Nakovics Lt. James Blackmore Capt. Scott Lapiedra FF James F. Bohan FF Christopher Bopp Lt. Joseph P. Cavalieri 1999 Capt. Vincent Fowler 2000 FF Kenneth Kerr 2001 FF Gregg J. Mcloughlin FF Donald L. Franklin EMS Lt. Barbara Poppo FF John J. Downing FF Brian D. Fahey FF Harry S. Ford FF Michael J. Gorumba Lt. Joseph Agnello Lt. Brian Ahearn FF Eric Allen FF Richard Allen BC James Amato FF Calixto Anaya Jr FF Joseph Angelini FF Joseph Angelini Jr FF Faustino Apostol Jr FF David Arce FF Louis Arena FF Carl Asaro Lt. Gregg Atlas FF Gerald Atwood FF Gerard Baptiste AC Gerard Barbara FF Matthew Barnes FF Arthur Barry Lt. Steven Bates Lt. Carl Bedigian FF Stephen Belson FF John Bergin FF Paul Beyer FF Peter Bielfeld FF Brian Bilcher FF Carl Bini FF Christopher Blackwell FF Michael Bocchino FF Frank Bonomo FF Gary Box FF Michael Boyle FF Kevin Bracken FF Michael Brennan FF Peter Brennan Capt. Daniel Brethel Capt. Patrick Brown FF Andrew Brunn Capt. Vincent Brunton FM Ronald Bucca FF Greg Buck Capt. William Burke Jr AC Donald Burns FF John Burnside FF Thomas Butler FF Patrick Byrne FF George Cain FF Salvatore Calabro Capt. Frank Callahan FF Michael Cammarata FF Brian Cannizzaro FF Dennis Carey FF Michael Carlo FF Michael Carroll FF Peter Carroll FF Thomas Casoria FF Michael Cawley FF Vernon Cherry FF Nicholas Chiofalo FF John Chipura FF Michael Clarke FF Steven Coakley FF Tarel Coleman FF John Collins FF Robert Cordice FF Ruben Correa FF James Coyle FF Robert Crawford Lt. John Crisci DC Dennis Cross FF Thomas Cullen III FF Robert Curatolo Lt. Edward D Atri FF Michael D Auria FF Scott Davidson FF Edward Day BC Thomas Deangelis Lt. Manuel Del Valle FF Martin Demeo FF David Derubbio Lt. Andrew Desperito BC Dennis Devlin FF Gerard Dewan FF George Dipasquale Lt. Kevin Donnelly Lt. Kevin Dowdell DC Raymond Downey FF Gerard Duy Capt. Martin Egan Jr FF Michael Elferis FF Francis Esposito Capt. Michael Esposito FF Robert Evans BC John Fanning BC Thomas Farino FF Terrence Farrell BC Joseph Farrelly 1st Dep. Comm. William Feehan FF Lee Fehling FF Alan Feinberg FF Michael Fiore Capt. John Fischer FM Andre Fletcher FF John Florio Lt. Michael Fodor FF Thomas Foley Lt. David Fontana FF Robert Foti Lt. Andrew Fredericks Lt. Peter Freund FF Thomas Gambino Jr Chief Of Dept. Peter Ganci Jr Lt. Charles Garbarini FF Thomas Gardner FF Matthew Garvey FF Bruce Gary FF Gary Geidel DC Edward Geraghty FF Denis Germain Capt. Vincent Giammona FF James Giberson Lt. Ronnie Gies FF Paul Gill Lt. John Ginley FF Jerey Giordano FF John Giordano FF Keith Glascoe FF James Gray BC Joseph Grzelak FF Jose Guadalupe Lt. Georey

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Guja Lt. Joseph Gullickson Lt. David Halderman Lt. Vincent Halloran FF Robert Hamilton FF Sean Hanley FF Thomas Hannafin FF Dana Hannon FF Daniel Harlin Lt. Harvey Harrell Lt. Stephen Harrell FF Timothy Haskell BC Thomas Haskell Jr Capt. Terence Hatton FF Michael Haub Lt. Michael Healey FF John Heernan FF Ronnie Henderson FF Joseph Henry FF William Henry FF Thomas Hetzel BC Brian Hickey Lt. Timothy Higgins FF Jonathan Hohmann FF Thomas Holohan FF Joseph Hunter Capt. Walter Hynes FF Jonathan Ielpi Capt. Frederick Ill , Jr FF William Johnston FF Andrew Jordan FF Karl Joseph Lt. Anthony Jovic FF Angel Juarbe Jr Rev. Mychal Judge Fm. Vincent Kane DC Charles Kasper FF Paul Keating Lt. Thomas R. Kelly FF Thomas W. Kelly FF Richard Kelly Jr FF Thomas Kennedy Lt. Ronald Kerwin FF Michael Kiefer FF Robert King Jr FF Scott Kopytko FF William Krukowski FM Kenneth Kumpel FF Thomas Kuveikis FF David Laforge FF William Lake FF Robert Lane FF Peter Langone FF Scott Larsen Lt. Joseph Leavey FF Neil Leavy FF Daniel Libretti Paramedic Carlos Lillo FF Robert Linnane FF Michael Lynch Lt. Michael Lynch FF Michael Lyons Lt. Patrick Lyons FF Joseph Maeo FF William Mahoney FF Joseph Maloney DC Joseph Marchbanks Jr Lt. Charles Margiotta FF Kenneth Marino FF John Marshall Lt. Peter Martin Lt. Paul Martini FF Joseph Mascali FF Keithroy Maynard FF Brian McAleese FF John McAvoy FF Thomas McCann Capt. William McGinn BC William McGovern FF Dennis McHugh FF Robert McMahon FF Robert McPadden FF Terence McShane FF Timothy McSweeney FF Martin McWilliams FF Raymond Meisenheimer FF Charles Mendez FF Steve Mercado FF Douglas Miller FF Henry Miller Jr FF Robert Minara FF Thomas Mingione Lt. Paul Mitchell BC Louis Modaeri Lt. Dennis Mojica FF Manuel Mojica FF Carl Molinaro FF Michael Montesi Capt. Thomas Moody BC John Moran FF Vincent Morello FF Christopher Mozzillo FF Richard Muldowney Jr FF Michael Mullan FF Dennis Mulligan Lt. Raymond Murphy Lt. Robert Nagel Lt. John Napolitano FF Peter Nelson FF Gerard Nevins FF Dennis OBerg Capt. Daniel OCallaghan Lt. Thomas OHagan FF Patrick OKeefe Capt. William OKeefe FF Kevin ORourke FF Douglas Oelschlager FF Joseph Ogren FF Samuel Oitice FF Eric Olsen FF Jerey Olsen FF Steven Olson FF Michael Otten FF Jerey Palazzo DC Orio Palmer FF Frank Palombo Fire Marshal Paul Pansini DC John Paolillo FF James Pappageorge FF Robert Parro FF Durrell Pearsall Lt. Glenn Perry Lt. Philip Petti Lt. Kevin Pfeifer Lt. Kenneth Phelan FF Christopher Pickford FF Shawn Powell FF Vincent Princiotta FF Kevin Prior BC Richard Prunty FF Lincoln Quappe Lt. Michael Quilty Ems Lt. Ricardo Quinn FF Leonard Ragaglia FF Michael Ragusa FF Edward Rall FF Adam Rand FF Donald Regan Lt. Robert Regan FF Christian Regenhard FF Kevin Reilly Capt. Vernon Richard FF James Riches FF Joseph Rivelli Jr FF Michael Roberts FF Michael Roberts FF Anthony Rodriguez FF Matthew Rogan FF Nicholas Rossomando FF Paul Ruback FF Stephen Russell Lt. Michael

On Sept. 11 and throughout FDNY history, death has affected all ranks. Since 1866, 820 reghters, 171 lieutenants, 83 captains, 48 battalion chiefs, 18 division or deputy chiefs, three assistant chiefs and one chief of department made the ultimate sacrice.

Russo BC Matthew Ryan FF Thomas Sabella FF Christopher Santora FF John Santore FF Gregory Saucedo FF Dennis Scauso FF John Schardt BC Fred Scheold FF Thomas Schoales FF Gerard Schrang FF Gregory Sikorsky FF Stephen Siller FF Stanley Smagala Jr FF Kevin Smith FF Leon Smith Jr FF Robert Spear Jr FF Joseph Spor BC Lawrence Stack Capt. Timothy Stackpole FF Gregory Stajk FF Jerey Stark FF Benjamin Suarez FF Daniel Suhr Lt. Christopher Sullivan FF Brian Sweeney FF Sean Tallon FF Allan Tarasiewicz FF Paul Tegtmeier FF John Tierney FF John Tipping II FF Hector Tirado Jr FF Richard Van Hine FF Peter Vega FF Lawrence Veling FF John Vigiano II FF Sergio Villanueva FF Lawrence Virgilio Lt. Robert Wallace Lt. Jerey Walz Lt. Michael Warchola Capt. Patrick Waters FF Kenneth Watson FF Michael Weinberg FF David Weiss FF Timothy Welty FF Eugene Whelan FF Edward White FF Mark Whitford Lt. Glenn Wilkinson BC John Williamson Capt. David Wooley FF Raymond York 2002 EMT Andre Lahens 2003 FF James J. OShea FF Thomas C. Brick 2004 FF Christian P. Engeldrum 2005 Lt. John J. Bellew Lt. Curtis W. Meyran FF Richard T. Sclafani EMS Lt. Brendan D. Pearson 2006 FF Michael C. Reilly Lt. Howard J. Carpluk Jr. 2007 FF Daniel F. Pujdak FF Robert Beddia Lt. Joseph Graagnino 2008 Lt. John H. Martinson FF Jamel M. Sears Lt. Robert J. Ryan, Jr. 2009 FF Paul Warhola
Key: AC=assistanct chief, AE=assistant engineer, BC=battalion chief, Capt.=captain, DC=division chief, FF= re ghter, FM= re marshal, Lt.=lieutenant

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