From Newsday

Report: City police and fire not prepared

BY GLENN THRUSH AND WILLIAM MURPHY | Staff Writers

7:05 PM EDT, July 22, 2004

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The city's police and fire rescue workers were not fully prepared to coordinate their work when terrorists struck the World Trade Center, the national Sept. 11 commission said Thursday in its final report.

Then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had issued a directive in July 2001 to eliminate potential conflicts among emergency responders and put his Office of Emergency Management in charge of any emergency that would require multiple agencies to repond.

"Nevertheless, the FDNY and NYPD each considered itself operationally autonomous," the report said.

"As of September 11, they were not prepared to comprehensively coordinate their efforts in responding to a major incident. The OEM had not overcome this problem," the report said.

Giuliani created the OEM in 1996, in part because of a series of embarrassing incidents where firefighters and police officers clashed at emergency scenes over who was in charge.

Such disputes — locally known as a "battle of the badges" — have occurred for decades, and still occur. The lack of cooperation on Sept. 11 extended to top police and fire commanders, the commission said.

Many blame the duplication of work between the two agencies that does not go on in most other cities.

"New York City needs to take a page from the book of the rest of the world when it comes to emergency planning," consultant Stephen Kuhr said Thursday.

"You should have a citywide Incident Management System that makes it clear who is in charge. The other thing is you need a facilitator, which should be OEM," said Kuhr, who served as deputy commissioner of OEM from 1996 to 2000.

Stephen Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, said he agreed with the commission's call for a clear response protocol.

"We still don't have one," Cassidy said, because Mayor Michael Bloomberg's most recent directive leaves no single agency in command at some emergencies. "I believe it compromises public safety. You need to put one agency in charge."

Many of the commission's findings were variations of staff reports and earlier public comments, but the report amounted to the panel's final word on an issue likely to remain thorny for years to come.

Among the commission's findings:

The Fire Department's only command vehicle that could communicate with police was being serviced on Sept. 11.

Actor Denis Leary donated a new $565,000 mobile command center to the Fire Department this week. The vehicle, which has telephone links with police and other agencies, will be deployed for the first time at the Republican National Convention next month.

The Port Authority Police Department lacked written rules for its officers responding to emergencies from other commands, and lacked radios that could communicate with other emergency agencies.

While pointed in its criticism, the commission noted the work and bravery of rescue personnel and the task they confronted.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking at a Brooklyn news conference, said he had been briefed on the report's outlines and hailed as "a big victory" the panel's conclusion that the city should get more homeland security funding because the threat of an attack is considered greater here than in most other cities.

Bloomberg noted that he was not mayor at the time of the attacks, and pointed out the changes he had made to the protocols just before the commission's hearings here.