It's a steamy August night, and the mood inside a Brooklyn firehouse is as foul as the air outside. "A sick joke," shouts one fireman in response to a question about improved training for first responders since Sept. 11, 2001. "The last training I had was a half-day class in Staten Island -- a joke -- inside a classroom! The only thing it told you was how to be able to tell the type of problem you're in -- HAZMAT incident, radiation exposure, terrorism, whatever -- by the people dead around you. A whole mass of dead people means one sort of incident, scattered blistered or convulsing people another."
New York firefighters are in an ill temper two years after the worst emergency they've ever faced. Not only do they feel unprepared for another major terrorist attack, they feel as if they're worse off than before the World Trade Center came down. Funding is down (by 10 percent, a whopping $100 million), personnel is down (more than 3,000 firefighters have left since 9/11 and have not been fully replaced), and, to hear the guys at the firehouse tell it, training sucks. "My brother on the police department's getting a lot more training," says another officer in the Brooklyn firehouse. "They can get all the training, but we're the ones who are going to be there when it happens. We're not going to be coming in after the dust clears -- we're the first responders."
Are these guys just bellyaching, or is their discontent symptomatic of a larger homeland security problem in the nation? All the signs say it's the latter.
New York is certainly a fair testing ground of the country's current preparedness for another major terrorist attack. For starters, New York remains the most likely target. It is America's largest port, with the most airports, the most vulnerable bridges and tunnels, and plenty of tall buildings that would make worldwide television footage if they were toppled. Perhaps more important, no city is more emblematic of American capitalism and the triumph of Western economic values. Clearly, New York needs to be girded for the worst, and yet it seems less prepared than before -- thanks to federal neglect by the Bush administration and wrong-headed local choices by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration.
Eleven months after the attacks, McKinsey and Co., the consulting firm, presented the city with a report on the effectiveness of the response to the terror attacks. While noting that some aspects of the operation were a success -- police skillfully moved traffic away from the scene, the subways evacuated thousands from the city center, temporary morgues were quickly set up -- the McKinsey report cited major failings in key areas: operations and preparedness, planning and management, technology, and support services. In the fire department, critical problems included the lack of a central command center, a lack of radio boosters, and insufficient training for catastrophic emergencies, especially the handling of hazardous materials. The report found an urgent need for the FDNY to upgrade training, improve heavy rescue and marine capabilities, add a second HAZMAT unit, acquire radio repeaters and boosters, and develop a far more effective command-and-control structure. In addition, FDNY and NYPD -- its jealous rival, the police department -- need to strike a peace agreement and develop efficient ways of working together.
Thirteen months after the report's release, on the second anniversary of 9/11, none of these problems had been solved. Chief among the unmet needs is the city's failure to establish a second HAZMAT unit, which would cost the department about $5 million a year. The existing HAZMAT unit is barely functioning; by late summer, 14 of its 35 positions were still unfilled. Reforms that have been attempted, such as joint operations between the fire and police forces, have traveled on very bumpy roads.
Indeed, New York firefighters feel that they're frozen in time -- a time before 9/11. The city's leadership, abetted by a stingy Republican administration in Washington, has put its head in the sand, treating its first responders like any other stressed line item in a year of budgetary woes. As the Bloomberg City Hall wrestles with severe revenue shortfalls, it has chosen to slash deeply into the FDNY's $1.1 billion budget, closing six firefighting companies and three of the city's 207 firehouses. Two other firehouse closings were avoided only because of last-minute state funding. Forty-nine fire engine crews have been reduced from five to four firefighters. Two marshals' offices -- marshals are the people who investigate the causes of fires, especially arson -- have been closed.
Yet a big part of New York's travails don't start in New York. They come from the nation's capital, where the Bush administration has consistently refused to step up to the financial plate when it comes to funding homeland security, especially first responders. Hamstrung by its own insistence on reckless tax cuts that are starving the federal budget, the Bush government has talked one game -- "We'll protect Americans" -- but played another -- "We can't afford it."
Firefighters and union leaders vividly remember Bush putting his arm around a firefighter and pledging support at Ground Zero shortly after 9/11. Now they point out that in his first two years in office, the president's budgets included zero funding for the FIRE Act, which provides block grants for equipment and training -- the two most urgent needs in the firefighting world today. For fiscal year 2004, Congress pushed through $900 million in FIRE Act grants, but the Bush administration budget only called for spending $500 million of those funds.
"We watched the president at one of the most horrific moments in the country's history," says Harold Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, "standing on that pile of debris and putting his arms around a retired New York firefighter, and heard ... how he was going to lead the attack against terror and provide safety at home. But in meaningful terms -- staffing and money -- he has clearly been unable or unwilling to follow through on that rhetoric. We are still not providing training for the very incidents we are telling the American people to be prepared for. We've been betrayed. As president, on behalf of the nation's firefighters, Bush has failed."
In total, the federal government is underfunding emergency responder needs by $98.4 billion over five years, according to estimates in a Council on Foreign Relations report released in June. In New York City alone, a request for $250 million in federal funds has thus far elicited only $22 million from Washington. In addition, the Bush administration has famously shifted the tax burdens and revenue shortfalls caused by 9/11 and the recession away from Washington and to the states. And when it does make grants to the states and cities, the Bush administration treats cities with the kind of hold-your-nose suspicion Republican administrations have historically reserved for urban areas. For example, it has promised roughly $10 per person to Wyoming but only $1.40 per person to New York City, the nation's most likely terrorist target.
In short, the Bush administration's approach to homeland security has been to make training and equipping first responders for a terrorist threat an unfunded mandate for states, cities, and fire departments nationwide, especially in high-risk areas like New York City. The states, in particular, are left holding the bag.
Meanwhile, back at the Brooklyn firehouse, the fallout from these policy choices is apparent in the fiery words around the kitchen table. "We're totally unprepared," growls one young fireman between stabs at his steak. "They've done d--- to train us. The top chiefs let the department down and also let the city down. They can say they didn't get the money to do it -- I don't care. They just didn't get it done. ... I think about it all the time. Who knows? I don't think I'm ready if it's a chemical attack. Firemen fight fires -- that's what we do. And no one has trained us to handle a chemical attack or a 50-story building collapsing."
The firemen's frustration, say department leaders, stems in part from a misunderstanding of what useful training really is. After all, one of the key conclusions of the McKinsey report was that too many firemen rushed into the World Trade Center towers without knowing what was happening, where to go, or what to do. Slowing down to analyze the problem -- the very techniques taught in the Staten Island classroom training -- is a key tool in handling future terrorist attacks, says department spokesman Francis X. Gribbon. "A great deal of training consists of making clear to firefighters that they must slow down, must not rush into danger, must wait until special units come in. It's a different world now, and our men must proceed with caution. Firefighters rush into danger, even -- no, especially -- on 9/11. The first lesson to be learned is that some caution must be observed: to stop and observe the signs."
Yet the Bush and Bloomberg administrations' parsimonious approach to funding, training, and hiring flies in the face of another key problem now faced by the FDNY: the experience gap. Sept. 11 not only cost 343 firemen's lives; it cost the department more than 4,000 collective years of experience. In addition, the trauma and danger accelerated retirements of 2,348 firefighters and the disability status of another 1,000. More than one in five firemen has left the force in the past two years -- more than twice the normal attrition rate -- leaving the city with a somewhat smaller and far less experienced force. According to the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, the experience of lieutenants has gone down, from 20.4 years to 14.8 years; that of captains from 24.4 to 19.9; and that of battalion chiefs from 28.7 to 25.4.
"The fire department is 99 percent experience-driven," comments the youngest fireman in the Brooklyn firehouse. "What you do today is built on what you did yesterday. When guys reach a scene, and there's a question of chain of command, the questions are: How many fires in your career? How many fires of the same kind as this one? The less experience a fireman has, the less resources he has when fighting a fire."
A warm rain is now falling outside the firehouse. The guys around the table have vented their frustrations, but don't feel much relief. One shakes his head and says, "I don't know if I'm prepared for a terror attack. I don't think so. If an arsonist lit a house on fire, the New York City Fire Department is prepared. But if someone put chemicals in the water ... if there's a car accident, we can get people out of cars, but if there's a HAZMAT condition, and if it comes down to individual firehouses and firemen ..."
Then the alarm sounds and the men suit up and rush out into the heat and rain, leaving their half-eaten steaks behind.
Blueprint Keywords: Extra Homeland Security
