Giuliani understood the danger earlier than most. “I assumed from the time I came into office that New York City would be the subject of a terrorist attack,” he says. The World Trade Center was bombed by Muslim terrorists in 1993, and while most New Yorkers pushed the memory aside, Giuliani did not. To ease the long-standing disaster-scene turf battles between police and fire, he created the office of Emergency Management and built a $13 million emergency command center on the 23rd floor of 7 WTC, a mid-size building in the complex. The place was ridiculed as “Rudy’s bunker.” He and his staff held drills playing out 10 disaster scenarios, from anthrax attacks to truck bombs to poison-gas releases. He didn’t foresee terrorists flying airliners into office towers, but the drilling ensured that when it happened, everyone in city government knew how to respond.
“PERSON OF THE YEAR: MAYOR OF THE WORLD,” TIME MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 31, 2001
THE MYTHMAKING ABOUT Rudy Giuliani began on September 11, and it involved an attempt to extrapolate his dramatic performance on that day into something more important. It also involved posttrauma fog—the focus on how the mayor had behaved in the moment of crisis, and not the emergency services his administration had put in place. It seemed unfeeling—almost unpatriotic—to ask whether Giuliani and his underlings had done enough to prepare New York for this terrible, although in some ways predictable, moment.
It was much less understandable, as the months wore on, to allow the afterglow of that moment to impose a national amnesia. Yet that was what happened. The facts—depressing but unavoidable—were that Giuliani had allowed the city to meet the disaster of September 11 unprepared in myriad ways. If the country had looked back dispassionately, it would have found that New York was left vulnerable on Giuliani’s watch on several critical counts. His sine qua non of preparedness for disasters like this one, the office of Emergency Management, had neither the power nor the capacity to cope with any grave crisis. The fire and police brass, which needed to work together, had not been taught—or if necessary forced—to do so. The command center had been built in the most vulnerable location possible, leaving the city without an operational headquarters when one was most needed. Giuliani had behaved from the outset of his mayoralty as if the 1993 bombing had never happened, ignoring its lessons and insulating himself from accessible intelligence about the continuing threat to his city. The public authority that owned the World Trade Center was encouraged to evade agreements binding it to comply with the building and fire codes. And the city’s most critical agency that morning, the Fire Department, was allowed to retain ancient customs, faulty communications, and a culture that left it incapable of protecting itself, or others, in its worst moment of crisis.
This is the alternate version of 9/11. It focuses on the infrastructure of the day—the decisions and plans that caused the men and women who were actors in the crisis to do the things they did and to suffer the fates that befell them. The story begins with the agency that was supposed to be overseeing the response: the New York City office of Emergency Management.
Mr. Kean: Mr. Mayor, just one thought. New York City on that terrible day in a sense was blessed because it had you as a leader. The commission is charged with making recommendations for the nation, and the rest of the cities in this country are not going to have a Mayor Giuliani. They may have a good man or a good woman, but they’re not going to have you. Have you got any thoughts about what kind of recommendations we could make, based on your experience, that would be across the board so that we could tell mayors of other cities—
Mr. Giuliani: I think the most important recommendation that I would make, put on the top of the list, is that cities should have Offices of Emergency Management. The office of Emergency Management that we established in ’95, ’96, was invaluable to us. We would not have gotten through, when I say September 11, I don’t just mean the day, I mean the months after that, and then the anthrax attack that followed it. Without OEM training us, doing drills, doing exercises, we would not have been able to handle all of that. If cities had that, it would help them a lot in terms of bringing together these resources, even in a city like New York as you found out.
PUBLIC HEARING, NATIONAL COMMISSION
ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES,
MAY 19, 2004, CHAIRED BY THOMAS H. KEAN
Any attempt to establish a unified command on 9/11 would have been frustrated by the lack of communication and coordination among responding agencies. The office of Emergency Management headquarters, which could have served as a focal point for information-sharing, was evacuated. Even prior to its evacuation, moreover, it did not play an integral role in ensuring that information was shared among agencies on 9/11.
STAFF STATEMENT #14, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES, RELEASED AT THE MAY 19, 2004, PUBLIC HEARING
NO ONE NOTICED the juxtaposition, at the same 2004 hearing, of Rudy Giuliani’s endorsement of his own office of Emergency Management as the indispensable national model of response and the 9/11 Commission staff’s finding that it was invisible when the city’s most deadly emergency required management. It was invisible before its command center at 7 World Trade Center was evacuated at 9:44 A.M., almost a full hour after the initial attack. And it was invisible in the tower lobbies and at the West Street incident command post nearby, where OEM’s top officials, having rushed to the North Tower instead of their own command center, could find virtually nothing to do.
The city had actually had an office of emergency management, run by the Police Department, before Giuliani became mayor. Giuliani turned it into an independent agency directly under his control, and that was the only specific claim of programmatic foresight he could make from his pre-9/11 past. It became both the starting and the ending point whenever Giuliani champions tried to depict him as a prescient, antiterror warrior who, in the ’90s, acted while others were distracted. Giuliani called OEM “one of the most important decisions I made” as mayor, in his best seller, Leadership. He even wrote that “as shocking” as the 9/11 attack was, “we had actually planned for just such a catastrophe,” citing OEM’s command center and drills as the sole evidence of such planning. It was also a prime theme of his many retrospective interviews—for example, he answered a 2003 question about what he did to secure the city after the 1993 attack by citing OEM and only OEM. “So then, on September 11, when it did happen in an unpredictable way,” he said, “there was a lot more preparation for it than people would realize.”
One of Giuliani’s deputy mayors and longtime friends from his days as a prosecutor, Randy Mastro, appeared on CNN as the towers were burning on September 11, and was asked if the city had changed its approach since the 1993 attack. It sure had, he said, slamming the handling of the bombing by the Dinkins administration. “There was no coordinated city response,” he said. “There was no Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management. Rudy Giuliani established that. It’s been one of the hallmarks of his tenure. And unfortunately, there are circumstances like this one where that coordinated effort has to come into play and it is coming into play right now.”
But in fact, on the day when it was most needed, OEM was virtually useless.
Cate Taylor, a 9/11 Commission staffer who listened to all the radio transmissions that day, says simply, “There’s nothing substantial on the OEM radios. OEM was not respected. Police and Fire don’t see it as a coordinating agency.” Sam Caspersen, one of the principal authors of the commission’s final report on the city’s response, concluded, “Nothing was happening at OEM” that had any “direct impact in the first 102 minutes of the rescue/evacuation operation.”1
The office of Emergency Management was directed by Richie Sheirer, a longtime city employee and Giuliani loyalist who had spent most of his career as a fire alarm dispatcher and a leader of one of the few unions to endorse Giuliani’s 1993 candidacy, the dispatchers’ union. Like many of the men closest to Giuliani, Sheirer’s unspectacular career had suddenly turned meteoric when he attached himself to the mayor’s coattails. A midlevel civil servant for decades, he was initially appointed top aide to Howard Safir, the head of the Fire Department, and then filled a similar position when Safir became police commissioner. From there, Sheirer leapfrogged into the top job at OEM, a role as a secondary 9/11 hero, and ultimately, a partner in Giuliani’s postmayoralty consulting firm.
From the beginning, Sheirer’s performance on 9/11 raised questions. Former New Jersey Attorney General John Farmer, who headed the 9/11 Commission unit that assessed the city response, found it strange that Sheirer, four OEM deputies, and a field responder went straight to the North Tower, where the Fire Department had set up a command post, rather than to the nearby emergency command center. “We tried to get a sense of what Sheirer was really doing. We tried to figure it out from the videos,” Farmer said. “We couldn’t tell. Everybody from OEM was with him, virtually the whole chain of command. Some of them should have been at the command center.”
In many ways, OEM’s dysfunction that day is the story of Sheirer’s performance, partly because the rest of the unit’s small top staff became an appendage to him. Jerry Hauer, Sheirer’s predecessor, who is widely respected as an emergency management expert, said in a recent interview, “Richie should have early on pulled together an interagency command post. But he didn’t command respect. He was lost. He was on his cell but he wasn’t talking to the Police Department or Fire Department incident commanders. There was an enormous breakdown in the operations of OEM.” Kevin Culley, a Fire Department captain who’d worked as a field responder at OEM virtually since its inception, was supposed to rush to the scene and did. Asked why most of the office’s brass were also there, he said, “That’s a good question. I don’t know what they were doing. It was Sheirer’s decision to go there on his own. The command center would normally be the focus of a major event and that would be where I would expect the director to be.”
For whatever reason, Sheirer went straight to the North Tower. But once there, he and his team did not appear to be doing the most critical task assigned to them in a crisis—making sure various city agencies, particularly the fire and police departments, worked together and followed the protocols laid out for an emergency. It was a challenging mission, since the police and fire departments, if given their druthers, would often attempt to elbow each other out of the action. That appeared to be what happened in the North Tower lobby, under Sheirer’s watch. The 9/11 Commission reported that a police rescue team “attempted to check-in” with the Fire Department chiefs in the North Tower at 9:15 A.M. and was “rebuffed,” and that “the OEM personnel present did not intercede.” A subsequent police team did not even attempt to check in, and no one at the North Tower enforced the protocols. Paul Browne, the current deputy police commissioner, said, “The Emergency Services Unit team is told to get lost and you can see Sheirer right there in the film footage from the day.”2
The only example of a supposedly effective action at the North Tower that Sheirer cited later was his claim that he tried to set up a triage center in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center.3 However, Richard Rotanz, who was Sheirer’s top deputy still at 7 WTC, was never told about the triage order. Since the building had already been vacated as unsafe, establishing a triage area there made no sense and was never attempted, according to sources still in the tower at the time. But that wasn’t Sheirer’s only misfire that day. He recounted later that when Rotanz called from the command center and “told me there were other planes unaccounted for,” Sheirer told the people in the lobby “that another plane was on the way,” instantly converting unspecific information into a very specific false alarm. All Rotanz actually knew, from a Secret Service agent he saw in the building, was that there were unconfirmed reports of planes in the air. Sheirer’s dangerous extrapolation spooked the chiefs in the lobby and quickly wound up on Fire and Police Department dispatches.
The camera in the North Tower caught much of what happened that morning, and at one point Sheirer’s voice is heard in the lobby telling Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen: “Tommy, Tommy, there’s another plane coming.”4 Sheirer was so shaken by the threat of another plane that he “instructed the Police Department aviation unit to not let another plane hit.” He told the commission that this bombast was an example of how “we were grasping at straws,” since, obviously, no helicopter could “stop a commercial jet going over 400 miles per hour.” Soon after Sheirer got the plane threat information, he left the lobby—because, he said, he was summoned to join Giuliani at 75 Barclay Street, where the police had set up a command post for the mayor.
Sheirer never went to OEM’s command center on the day it was most needed. Nor did he go to the various active police or fire command posts on opposite sides of the towers, though OEM was supposed to make sure that the two departments worked together at a unified command post. Yet somehow, just a month after 9/11, Sheirer became a shining New York magazine profile, dubbed “the man behind the curtain” by Giuliani and “the wizard of OEM.” In the article, Sheirer reeled off a list of theoretical 9/11 achievements, including placing calls for search and rescue teams—efforts that he attributed to others in his eventual commission testimony. He even claimed to have “helped move the Fire Department command post” out of the North Tower, though he never went to its new location on West Street in front of the World Financial Center.
Described by the magazine as “the short, stout man who bows his head in the limelight,” Sheirer proved quite willing to celebrate his own modesty. “I think it’s very valuable to be invisible for the job I do. We don’t need fanfare,” he said amid 5,270 words of nothing but. “Invisibility enhances our ability to work with everyone because they know we’re not looking to take the limelight.”
It wasn’t just the very visible post-9/11 Sheirer who was invisible on 9/11. His top deputy and eventual replacement, John Odermatt, was also at the North Tower and says that from the moment the first plane hit, he left only two staffers at the center. Commission investigators found that no one from any of the 60 public agencies or private entities like the hospital association and Con Ed that were assigned participants in OEM’s emergency response ever showed up at the command center. (Odermatt says that “some came and were told to leave.”) So the command center was out of business from the outset.
After nearly a year of investigation, the commission staff prepared a series of questions about OEM’s shortcomings for Sheirer’s 2004 public testimony.5 Though the commissioners didn’t ask most of these questions, and though many were clearly rhetorical, they resonate to this day. Noting that Sheirer stayed in the North Tower for an hour, the staff queried, “Why did you select this as your base of operations?” Pointing to “the large screen televisions and ability to monitor so many radio frequencies” at the command center, they asked, “was OEM conveying any information to incident managers who were struggling with limited situational awareness?” Observing that the Police Department, Fire Department, and Port Authority were “operating independently of each other” and not “coordinating their efforts” in the climb “towards the impact zones,” the staff wondered “what steps OEM was taking that morning to address this?” No rationale for Sheirer’s prolonged lobby stay, no information conveyed to commanders, and no steps to coordinate the response were ever discovered.
The agency was so irrelevant to the city’s response that when Mayor Mike Bloomberg decided in 2002 to commission independent assessments, he asked McKinsey & Company, a major consulting firm, to do separate reports on the police and fire departments but didn’t ask them to examine OEM’s performance. When the McKinsey reports came out in 2002 and were critical of the city’s response, it was Sheirer, a Giuliani Partner by then, who responded in the Times, blasting the report as “unprofessional” partly because McKinsey had not bothered to talk to him.
The Times’ page-one, first-anniversary story by Al Baker offered its own implied rationale for McKinsey’s supposed oversight, concluding that OEM “found itself marginalized and overwhelmed” on 9/11, adding that “the destruction of its command center was only the most visible of its problems.” Baker’s list of OEM failings that day—led by its inability to get the police and fire departments “to talk to one another”—was depicted as a consequence of an agency that “was plagued by politics from the start and later suffered a long period in which it languished.” Calling OEM “perhaps publicly oversold,” Baker contrasted the “trumpeting” of its “vision and effectiveness” by Giuliani with the fact that it had only held a single tabletop drill in the 18 months that Sheirer was in charge prior to 9/11. Even Odermatt, who limited his own public praise of the agency to its achievements in the weeks after 9/11, told Baker that there were things “that we could have done better” that day. When Odermatt became commissioner in the Bloomberg administration, he quickly rewrote most of the agency’s emergency plans and named a deputy commissioner for preparedness, discovering a void 9/11 had made apparent.
Sheirer remained in charge of the agency for three months after Giuliani’s term ended, and he departed without leaving in his wake a single meaningful piece of paper or disk about 9/11 or the lead-up to it. In the end, OEM was such a 9/11 nullity that even Giuliani, while praising it during his commission testimony, shifted midsentence to saluting its “invaluable” service “in the months after” the attack, a time-specific tribute emphasized by Odermatt, Caspersen, and others.
COMMAND AND CONTROL of police and fire response is critical in a massive emergency—so much so that in 2004, the Department of Homeland Security barred funding to cities that did not institute unified command practices that put one agency in charge of each anticipated emergency. Such practices would have been particularly critical in a city like New York, where the two departments had a long-standing and not-so-friendly rivalry. In Leadership, Giuliani described how he’d done just that, creating OEM to “make it clear that we could no longer have agencies individually responding to emergencies.” The new “hybrid” crises, he wrote, required some overarching authority “that was equipped to coordinate many different departments. A bombing, for example, might result in an awful fire, but it’s also a criminal act and may additionally require a response from other agencies. An attack of sarin gas would require intense coordination of the Health, Police and Fire Departments. I decided there should be an overarching agency—an office of Emergency Management to coordinate and plan emergency response.”
The Times’ Baker was the first to reveal just how far Giuliani’s description was from reality, and how undefined and disorganized the city’s command and control was on 9/11. He called it an “undisputed, startling fact” that OEM had “failed to fully establish the most basic aspect of emergency response: determining who is in charge—and when and why.” Baker wrote that the most fundamental part of OEM’s mission—“having all agencies abide by a formal system that lays out under what circumstances police, fire or other officials take control of an emergency”—never existed in New York City “the way it does in other cities.”
As axiomatic as the Times considered that assessment, Rudy Giuliani brazenly challenged it when he testified before the commission almost two years later. And just as no one noticed the bizarre juxtaposition of his OEM boasts at the 9/11 hearing and the commission staff’s OEM critique, the contrast between his command and control claims and the staff’s simultaneous findings of disarray also passed unnoticed.
Giuliani testified flatly that there “was not a problem of coordination on 9/11,” while the staff explicitly found a “lack of coordination” and attributed it to police and fire command systems that were “designed to work independently, not together.” Giuliani even dismissed decades of assumptions about the “war of the badges,” insisting that the departments deferred to one another in “big emergencies,” claiming he “saw several hundred of these and they’ve never proved to be a problem.” If the two departments arrived at a scene and there “was any doubt” about who was in charge, Giuliani declared that the OEM director “had the authority to say Police Department in charge, Fire Department in charge.” That’s why “you have to have a very strong OEM,” he concluded.
Yet the day before Giuliani’s testimony, the commission staff report had found that the two departments were “accustomed to responding independently to emergencies by 9/11” and that “neither had demonstrated the readiness to respond to an Incident Commander if that was an officer outside of their department.” OEM, the staff concluded, “had not overcome this problem.” Commission member John Lehman said the day the staff report was released that the city’s “command and control and communications” were a scandal. “It’s not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city,” the former Reagan administration navy secretary said, reflecting the staff’s findings and provoking tabloid outrage. Lehman’s statements, which occurred during his questioning of Sheirer, Von Essen, and Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, weren’t restricted to the performance that day, focusing as well on the period since the 1993 bombing. “It’s a scandal that after laboring for eight years,” he said, assailing a Giuliani directive on command and control issued in July 2001, “the city comes up with a plan for incident commanders that simply puts in concrete this clearly dysfunctional system.”
The commission’s final report echoed Lehman and the staff findings that “the FDNY and NYPD each considered itself operationally autonomous” and “as of September 11, were not prepared to comprehensively coordinate their efforts in responding to a major incident.” In addition to the commission critique, Giuliani’s expansive claims about OEM’s ability to coordinate the prickly, independent forces were also contradicted by Sheirer’s private testimony to commission investigators a month earlier, when he said that “OEM was not so much about being a referee” as it was “about assisting” fire and police. Sheirer added that it was OEM’s “role to support the Incident Commander, whoever that may be,” hardly sounding like the man who was supposed to pick one.
The starkest critique of OEM’s performance came during the testimony of Edward Plaugher, the chief of the Arlington County Fire Department in Virginia, who led the emergency response to the Pentagon attack. The commission’s report said that Plaugher and the other Pentagon responders “overcame the inherent complications of a response across jurisdictions because the Incident Command System—a formalized management structure for emergency response—was in place in the National Capital Region on 9/11.” Plaugher delivered spellbinding testimony, contrasting the Pentagon and New York responses just an hour or so after Giuliani and his entourage left the hearing.
After Plaugher finished describing how Virginia, D.C., and Maryland worked together, Commissioner Jamie Gorelick said that Plaugher had told the staff “that the lack of a unified command” in New York “dramatically impacted the loss of first responder lives on 9/11.” Asked if that was still his view, Plaugher deadpanned, “Yes, ma’am, it is.”
“We, as a nation, have been practicing unified command for decades and we have honed this down to an absolute science,” he explained, saluting the practice of putting one commander in charge of all the varied units responding to an event. “And so, for us now to be struggling with this is a little bit unconscionable for a lot of us in the profession. In March 2001, the fire chiefs and police chiefs from the entire Washington metropolitan region spent two full days at the National Fire Academy and worked out regional differences and left agreeing that unified command was how we were going to operate. And on 9/11, that’s exactly what we did.” Gorelick asked if “the ways things worked out in New York City” were “not consistent with the way unified commands work in the rest of the nation,” and Plaugher said the city was “struggling with understanding the concept of who’s in charge of what.”
Remarkably, with Giuliani dominating the coverage, no one reported what Plaugher said. As telling as his public comments were, the 38-year fire service professional was even more outspoken when he met with the commission’s investigators in the October 16, 2003 staff interview that Gorelick cited. He contended that “they built a system” in New York City “that allowed and encouraged that tragedy to occur.”6
“If you truly build barriers,” Plaugher observed, “you won’t hear from the police helicopter that the buildings are going to fall,” pointing out one of the deadliest consequences of New York’s 9/11 segregated response (the police copter warned that “large pieces” would fall, but the fire department never heard the warning). Asked about his own 9/11 ride in a police helicopter over the Pentagon “in contrast to the lack of such assets provided the FDNY,” Plaugher responded that “if you’re locked into your own closed system, that type of thing is going to happen. You need to create a nurturing environment, not a closed one.”
“Don’t sugarcoat this,” he told the staff. “When you think you’re bigger than life—convince yourself of it—you’re capable of doing things like the WTC response. They truly think they’re bigger than life.” The investigators noted: “Plaugher basically thinks that the loss of first responders in the 9/11 NYC response was of no great surprise to those within the community—‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’”
Past president of the Virginia Fire Chiefs Association and a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Emergency Response Advisory Board, Plaugher said that New York’s fire and police departments had “historically held the position that they are unique within the first responder community.” The fire chiefs, he said, have consistently said that “it’s impossible to run an incident in New York City with a unified command.” That culture, he said, was a by-product of “the formative years of senior Fire Department leadership in the mid-70’s and 1980’s,” when the department fought “thousands” of arson and other fires, and became convinced that they were “invincible.” This “entrenched them into the ‘go it alone’ approach,” concluded Plaugher.
The commission took a pass on Plaugher’s tough tone, saying that “whether the lack of coordination” between the Fire Department and the Police Department had “a catastrophic effect”—meaning whether it killed people—was a “subject of controversy” with too many variables for the commission to “responsibly quantify those consequences.” The final report did find, however, that the Incident Command System “did not function” in New York City. That was as flat and sweeping a conclusion as Giuliani’s disingenuous denial. Sam Caspersen put it even more bluntly in an interview: “Anytime there isn’t a fistfight between the Fire Department and the Police Department, they think it’s an example of a coordinated response.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology issued its own 2005 report on the emergency response after a $23 million study that went into far more detail than the 9/11 Commission could. “An analysis of the overall city emergency response structure,” the report found, “indicates that New York City did not have a formalized Incident Command System that encompassed citywide emergency response operations.” Dismissing OEM as “basically a support organization for expediting emergency response,” NIST concluded that “there was no formal structure of unified command between departments” and that interagency attempts to work together on 9/11 “were stymied by a lack of existing protocols that clearly defined authorities and responsibilities.”
Bloomberg’s McKinsey study reached a similar judgment: “Throughout the response on September 11, the FDNY and the NYPD rarely coordinated command and control functions and rarely exchanged information related to command and control.” As unnoticed as these critiques were, they combined to destroy any argument that the Giuliani administration, through OEM, had achieved a prime objective as the mayor himself once described it: getting the emergency services on the same page.
COMMAND AND CONTROL failings were not the only city response errors with possible catastrophic effect that day. There was also the destruction of the ballyhooed Emergency Operations Center, which Giuliani had proudly positioned 23 flights up at 7 World Trade Center. The 9/11 Commission did not apply the same deadly calculus to the destruction of the command center as it tried to do to the costs of the command and control debacle. But the commission’s senior counsel, John Farmer, cited a number of ways that an operating command center might have saved lives. If the center had been located elsewhere and thus able to remain operational that day, “I really think it would have made a difference. Maybe the failure to communicate among the agencies doesn’t happen that day because that thing is functioning. That’s the point of it. I’ve never been convinced that they could have done that much better with civilians, but I think the number of responder deaths could have been greatly reduced. That’s where I think the real tragedy is.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the McKinsey report also found that the loss of the command center made things worse, with NIST saying it “further impaired the coordination process.” But neither spelled out the consequences of this loss like Farmer did, partly because the specifics are bizarrely both axiomatic and speculative. Examining the real-life costs of this lost command center is also a decidedly personal assignment of blame, since the siting was unquestionably a decision made by the hands-on mayor. Even Giuliani champions like Time called it “a mistake” to locate the command center on the 23rd floor of 7 WTC, part of a complex viewed long before 9/11 as one of the top terrorist targets in the world. Sheirer ridiculed it before and after 9/11. At a top-level meeting of the Giuliani administration, Police Commissioner Howard Safir fought the mayor’s attempt to put it there, calling it “Ground Zero” years before 9/11 because of the 1993 attack.7 And Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed police official, blasted it as well.
Giuliani, however, overruled all of this advice. Rejecting an already secure, technologically advanced city facility across the Brooklyn Bridge, he insisted on a command center within walking distance of City Hall, a curious standard quickly discarded by the Bloomberg administration, which instead put its center in Brooklyn. With then OEM head Jerry Hauer unwilling to put a facility underground in the City Hall area because of flooding concerns, Giuliani wound up settling in 1997 on the only bunker ever built in the clouds, at a site shaken to its foundation four years earlier by terrorists who vowed to return.
It was at once the dumbest decision he ever made and the one that made him a legend. If the center had been elsewhere, all the dramatic visuals that turned the soot-covered Giuliani into a nomad warrior would instead have been tense but tame footage from its barren press conference room, where reporters had been corralled prior to 9/11 for snowstorms and the millennium celebration. The closest cameras would’ve gotten to Giuliani-in-action would have been shots of him with a hundred officials from every conceivable agency and organization, working over monitors, maps, mikes, and phones. Had he been able to get into and operate from a command center he says he “headed” for shortly after 8:46 that morning, he might have been more effective, but he would also have been less inspirational.
Farmer says there’s a legion of ways a functional command center might have helped spare lives that day. To start with, the towers were “configured in such a way that the fire chiefs told us they had no idea about the conditions on the upper floors,” while the command center “would’ve had video to relay directly to the lobby.” With every departmental radio frequency available and OEM, police, and fire brass with the mayor, Farmer says that “they would have had access to ongoing reports” from police helicopters, including that pilot’s warning that the South Tower looked like it would partially collapse nine minutes before it did. The 9/11 Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and McKinsey all reported that this “potentially important information,” as McKinsey put it, “never reached the Incident Commander,” Pete Ganci, “or the senior FDNY chiefs in the lobbies.”
Joe Pfeifer, the battalion chief who took initial command of the North Tower lobby and played a pivotal role all morning, put the pilot warning in the broader context of the overall information breakdown. “We weren’t getting full intelligence reports of what was going on. I don’t think you saw any ranking law enforcement in the lobby. The helicopters were up, but we had no means to communicate with them. We tried a number of times to do that, but it wasn’t happening and no one was coming in to volunteer any information to us. Helicopters were able to assess the situation. My question is ‘Who did they tell?’ They didn’t tell us. Or if they told anybody, whoever they told had a responsibility to tell us.”8
Another vital cross-departmental source of information that might have been available to Ganci and Pfeifer had the command center been operative was the buildings department. Farmer says that “it might have been helpful to have someone at the command center that day who was a structural engineer” and, from videos, could have anticipated the collapse. Engineers from the Department of Buildings routinely appeared at the command center during emergencies and surely would have been summoned or sent there that morning.
The saga of John Peruggia, the OEM-assigned emergency medical chief is another example, like the pilot’s unheard warning, of how a functioning command center might have affected lives. He was standing in the lobby of 7 WTC with a Department of Buildings engineer. Several minutes before the South Tower fell, the engineer warned them that he was “very confident” that the structural stability of both towers “had been compromised and that the North Tower, which was nearest to them, was ‘in danger of imminent collapse.’” Peruggia sent a messenger by foot all the way to the West Street command post to convey the engineer’s warning because he had no radio or phone that could reach Chief Ganci.9 The messenger got to Ganci 30 seconds before the first collapse. The engineer made this judgment from the ground, and it was relayed literally on the ground. If a command center had been operating with engineers, videos, communications, and decision makers of every stripe, this judgment might have been made much earlier and communicated much more quickly.
That’s why George Delgrosso, an ex–city detective who worked on Farmer’s team at the commission, considers it obvious that a command center would have made a difference: “If there was a working center—anywhere—all information would have been going into one location.”
The brass might even have found out about the horribly mismanaged 9-1-1, fire dispatch, and Port Authority police desk communications, all of which were telling civilians below the fires to stay in place long after full evacuations had been ordered by the chiefs. They also might have figured out a way to tell people above the fires not to head for the inaccessible roof, and to try instead to go down—a lifesaving option for the 18 people who were lucky enough to find the only open passageway, Stairway A in the South Tower. The clearance of occupied elevators and even the deployment of far more firefighters than required could well have been handled differently.
Farmer certainly thinks a functioning command center could also have tackled “the redundancy” of so many units, police and fire, checking the same floors again and again, lessening the need for all those firefighters on the stairs. Delgrosso put it succinctly: “If anybody kept a record of which floors were searched, they wouldn’t have needed half those firefighters.” The commission report concluded that “with a better understanding of the resources already available”—which certainly would have come with a functioning command center—“additional units might not have been dispatched to the South Tower at 9:37,” a decision that led to fatalities. Farmer stressed in an interview that reducing these redundant and unnecessary forays was a prime way a command center could have saved lives.
Though Giuliani has been criticized for his siting decision, he’s never been forced in any public appearance to deal with its possible consequences that day. He’s made it clear that had the command center been functional, that’s where he would have gone right away. In the fourth paragraph of his book, Leadership, right after describing how he got the news of the initial attack, Giuliani launched his best-selling leadership manual with a salute to the command center.
“My administration had built a state-of-the-art command center,” he wrote, “from which we handled the emergencies that inevitably befall a city like New York, such as the West Nile virus, blackouts, heat waves, snowstorms and Y2K. It was packed with computers and television screens to monitor conditions all over the city and beyond. It had generators in case the power failed, sleeping accommodations in case we had to stay overnight, storage tanks with water and fuel, and stockpiles of various antidotes. So that’s where Denny Young and I headed.”
Despite this unambiguous statement, Giuliani has since quietly floated an alternative notion of where he was headed that morning. The only time he offered a detailed account of this other scenario was in his private testimony before the commission staff in 2004. “Even if the Emergency Operations Center had been available,” he told the staff, “I would not have gone there for an hour or an hour and a half. I would want to spend some time at the actual incident, at operations command posts.” He claimed he would have gone to the center “once everything was worked out on the streets.” This revisionist version of events allowed him to duck the question of whether the location, and consequent loss, of the command center had life-or-death implications. But it’s hard to see why Giuliani would insist that the command center be within walking distance of City Hall if he planned to first drive to the scene of the megadisaster, wherever it occurred. And many of the people who knew the situation best, including Jerry Hauer, his deputy Steven Kuhr, and Sheirer’s first deputy, Odermatt, rejected the notion that the command center was a second stop, to be visited 90 minutes after an emergency. Kuhr said, “That’s the kind of thing you hear from the uninitiated,” and Odermatt insisted that “for sure” the command center would have been “the center of command” if it had been usable that morning.
In fact, the mayor’s actions that morning spelled out both how clear it was that he intended to manage a crisis from his command facility and how pivotal a role a center could have played. Giuliani has acknowledged that when he got downtown and was told the command center was unsafe, “I immediately devised two priorities.” The first was that “we had to set up a new command center.” Leading an entourage of top aides that soon reached 25, he foraged for hours trying to find any semiuseful replacement, breaking into a locked firehouse at one point, and winding up at the Police Academy in midtown.
His top aides have made much the same point. Von Essen said that when he went to the command center and was told everyone was gone, he was really upset. “How can we be evacuating OEM now?” he remembered muttering. “What are we going to do, walk around all day?” He told a 2002 interviewer that he went to the command center because he “thought that was where we should all be” since that’s what it was “built for.”10
When Sheirer testified before the commission, he was as animated about the missing command center as Von Essen. Asked about the decision to put it at 7 WTC, Sheirer derided the location and blamed it on Hauer, as if the micromanaging mayor had had nothing to do with picking the site for a facility he’d planned in detail. In his private testimony, Sheirer tried to minimize what the loss meant, though he never argued that it was supposed to be used only after a situation was stabilized. And in his public appearance, Sheirer raved about its value. “That center was the most technologically advanced,” he said. “It allowed us to deal with anything. The only problem is it had to be available to us when we really needed it. You need to make the commitment that this is a vital, vital facility. It should be in a hardened, security facility.” Then, with his voice rising, looking up from behind his huge block glasses, he said, “Nothing should impede your ability to use it.”
GIULIANI’S CLAIM IN a 2003 interview that creating OEM was “one of the first things that I did when I became mayor” missed the mark by nearly two and a half years. Even when the new agency started—27 months after Giuliani took office—it had almost no budget, only a director and a secretary on payroll, and borrowed space in a crammed city office. It stayed that way until the command center opened for operations, almost six and a half years after the 1993 bombing that Giuliani now says prompted it. The truth is that neither creating OEM nor building the command center had anything to do with the first bombing, even though the city’s handling of that attack was a clarion call for just such a reorganization. OEM orchestrated 10 major drills and exercises by Time magazine’s count, but none of them involved the targeted WTC complex or even replicated the 1993 attack elsewhere. After 9/11, Giuliani said he “assumed from the time” he was elected that the city would be attacked, a claim impossible to square with the years it took him to open his frontline center of defense.
It’s one thing not to anticipate a plane wiping out multiple stories of a high-rise; it’s another not to ever organize a multiagency, OEM-coordinated drill for what post-’93 fire experts started calling a “mega high-rise event” associated with a terrorist attack. According to OEM’s Hauer, Steven Kuhr, and Kevin Culley, the agency never even had a tabletop exercise about a high-rise fire, either mega, terrorist-connected, or not. Maybe the high-rise fire scenario was all too familiar, and, as ’93 and 9/11 established, all too hard to manage.
Even though a terrorist-provoked mega high-rise fire had already happened, and information culled from a much-publicized raid on a Queens bomb factory suggested it would happen again, high-rise preparation was treated as passe in the Giuliani era. The astonishing fact is that OEM never even developed a plan for a high-rise fire. Culley, whose job it was from 1997 to 9/11 to go to high-rise fires for OEM, said that “there was no OEM plan” other than “to ask the chief if there were any resources outside the Fire Department that he could use.” He said OEM had “rough draft plans for minor emergencies” like a transit strike. “But I can’t recall anybody anticipating another attack like the ’93 bombing. We did not exercise any plan for something like that—there certainly was never any written plan for it.” Because of both the ’93 and the Oklahoma bombings, there was a concern about restricting parking by trucks and vans close to tall buildings, he says, “but no plan or exercise about physical terrorist attacks.”
Kuhr, top deputy at OEM for four years, confirmed that the agency “never published a high-rise fire plan,” and that “somewhere along the way someone probably decided that it wasn’t necessary,” since the Fire Department had one. “From a strategic perspective,” Kuhr said, “I could understand why we would want to do a plan. It wouldn’t have dealt with the tactics of firefighting; it would have been integrating the various agencies.” But it was never seriously considered. And if OEM was relying on the Fire Department’s plan, revised in Von Essen’s second year, it was a very thin reed. As the 9/11 Commission’s Caspersen pointed out, the plan “had no protocols for skyscraper collapse,” much less any interagency authority.
New York firefighters had never been confronted with a blaze that consumed a full floor in a high-rise. Asked if the commission had found any evidence that the Fire Department had plans for how to fight such an enormous challenge, John Farmer responded that it had not. “Obviously, that’s a huge problem,” he added. “I don’t know whose mistake it is. What is the strategy if the top ten floors are engulfed? How do you fight that? Everyone wishes that there should be a strategy for dealing with a catastrophe like that. What if it’s the 20th floor that’s engulfed? Is everyone going to die above that floor? There was no plan.” As difficult as these questions are for every city with skyscrapers, the only city whose towers had already been bombed spent no systemic energy dissecting them, either at the Fire Department or at OEM.
OEM’s original organization chart in 1996 had eight emergency management trainers, with only one of those listed as responsible for developing a “High Rise Fire Plan.”11 This trainer—a Fire Department captain assigned to OEM—had five other assignments, left fairly soon after he started, and never developed the plan. Steven Kuhr supervised him but doesn’t recall anyone inheriting his fire plan responsibility. Half the trainers were assigned to work on a chemical/biological/ nuclear response plan, which Kevin Culley said was “the focus” of the agency. OEM had “a plan to deliver pharmaceuticals,” in case of a weapons-of-mass-destruction attack, Culley said, but not one to deliver occupants to the street from a fire that consumed one or more upper floors of a tower.
Referring to the list of blackout, storm, transit strike, and building collapse scenarios that OEM trained for, Senator Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 Commission, asked Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik why “exercises dealing with the potential of al Qaeda attacking New York City one more time” were “notably absent from this list?” All Kerik could do was cite OEM’s biological and chemical exercises. Giuliani also told the commission that the police and fire departments “could handle almost any emergency ad hoc, but what they were really behind on was biological and chemical attacks. I thought we needed an umbrella agency to train and push them” on that.
OEM ran detailed scenarios for WMD and Red X bubonic plague, but it was still counting on a largely unchanged Fire Department plan to handle the hot potato that had already left a ’93 burn. It didn’t seem to matter that no one in ’93 had followed the FDNY’s basic strategy—which was to tell occupants to remain where they were (called “defend-in-place”) while firefighters ascended. Nor did it matter that the firefighters in ’93 had taken nearly the same four hours to reach the top that it took the thousands of self-starting occupants to evacuate themselves.
If the usual problem is that generals obsess over the last war, the Giuliani team had the opposite inclination. It was fixated on the next one. As necessary as bio/chem preparation was, the primary terrorist threat predictably remained a high-rise fire, and the numerous ignored reports after 1993 about improving the city’s response to that threat would, not just in hindsight, have made more useful mayoral reading than one more Churchill biography. But studies like the 1995 World Trade Center Task Force’s examination of high-rise building code changes necessitated by the bombing—which was begun by Mayor David Dinkins’s fire and buildings commissioners and completed by Giuliani’s—were never acted on in City Hall or even turned over to OEM.12 Hauer and Kuhr said that they had never heard of them. The after-action recommendations of the fire chiefs that oversaw the 1993 response also became dead letters, suggesting that six dead victims were not enough of a policy-changing mandate.13
Yet a high-rise fire was, of course, precisely what the city faced on 9/11. The best rebuttal of the Giuliani sound bite that no one could have anticipated what happened that day is Giuliani himself. He told Tim Russert in his first major television interview after September 11 that the city treated the attack as a fire and “we were basically following all the steps we normally follow in a rescue or fire.” With that predictable a challenge, the calamitous response begs for explanation.
THE FIRE DEPARTMENT had the same radios in 2001 as it had in 1993. In fact, it essentially had been using the same radios since the 1960s, though they were more suitable for a burning three-story walk-up than for a steel inferno. The high-rise deficiencies of the “handie-talkie” radios were the most disastrous example of a failure to anticipate the needs of the emergency services in an age of terror.
The Giuliani administration waited until its final months in March 2001 to introduce a new digital radio that was potentially interoperable with police radios and better able to penetrate high-rises—new capacities that could finally correct the communications difficulties of 1993. The new radio, however, performed so badly that the Fire Department had to withdraw it within days of issuing it. Von Essen vowed to fix the quirks immediately and get the digitals back in the field, but six months later he and the mayor, each with a foot out the door, had done nothing. So, on 9/11, firefighters were still stuck with the old handie-talkies.
The only effort that made any headway in the eight Giuliani years to get police and fire personnel to talk to each other by radio was engineered by OEM’s Jerry Hauer, who got interoperable 800-megahertz radios to chiefs in both departments. “Sitting on the shelf at fire dispatch,” said Delgrosso, were the OEM radios that could have connected the two uniformed forces. “They took them out on weekends to check the batteries and put them back on the shelf.” On 9/11, a day of such communications overload that everyone was stepping on everyone else’s radioed messages, OEM’s high-powered and interoperable radios were as deadly silent as ever. The Fire Department incident commander, Pete Ganci, was said by friends to have left his 800-megahertz radio in the trunk of his car.
In his prepared statement for the commission hearings, Hauer was almost penitent about the failing. “As I look back at September 11 and what might have had an impact on the number of people lost, I see our inability to get the departments to talk with one another on a common frequency as one of the issues that might have had an impact on reducing the loss of life,” he said.
The 9/11 Commission found that the effectiveness of the handie-talkies was “drastically reduced in the high-rise environment,” and that as many as eight Fire Department companies in the North Tower did not receive the evacuation order “via radio or directly from other first responders.” It did not say how many additional companies got word of the evacuation only from “other first responders,” but, obviously, firefighters are far less likely to respond to a secondhand evacuation order relayed by cops than to one they hear from a chief on their own radios. So more than eight companies experienced potentially deadly radio silence. While the commission attributed some of the communications difficulties to off-duty firefighters without radios, and some to firefighters who were tuned to the wrong channel, it did conclude that the radios themselves were a factor.
In the months immediately after 9/11, Von Essen and other Fire Department officials began blaming the communications breakdown on malfunctioning repeaters, or amplifiers, that the Port Authority installed after the ’93 bombing. When the commission determined that the repeaters in each tower were functional that day, Giuliani tried another version of the same argument, contending that the chiefs in the lobby “decided” the repeater “wasn’t operable” and that “they couldn’t use it.” Both positions appeared to be attempts to divert attention from the radios. But every investigation that’s examined the 9/11 failings—including the commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and McKinsey—refused to take that bait. These studies indicate that the collapse of the South Tower may well have damaged the North Tower repeater controls, as it did nearly everything else in the lobby next door. In addition, the chiefs fled the North Tower lobby right after the South Tower collapse, so there was no one left to operate the repeater. Consequently, the demise of the repeater after the 9:59 collapse means that the fire companies who never heard any of the subsequent North Tower evacuation orders—the critical message of the day—would have had to rely excessively on their radios, even if the repeater had initially been operative.
Beyond the dropped evacuation messages on the old radios, the three investigations also pointed to the dire consequences of the interoperability failures that day. When the commission said that “FDNY chiefs would have benefited greatly had they been able to communicate” with police helicopters, it was concerned not just about the missed pilot warning that the South Tower was about to fall. With interoperable radios, the chiefs would have also heard the pilots repeatedly warn of the North Tower collapse, as early as 25 minutes before it happened. In fact, some chiefs didn’t even know that the South Tower had collapsed, though the pilots reported it immediately.
Nonetheless, the commission concluded that “the technical failure of FDNY radios, while a contributing factor, was not the primary cause of many firefighting fatalities in the North Tower.” This murky language could mean that more firefighters died for reasons other than dysfunctional radios than those who died because of them, but since 343 of them died, that still leaves a long possible casualty list. It could also mean that the command and control breakdown, for example, had consequences more deadly than the radio malfunction, making it the “primary cause” of firefighter fatalities. In this choose-your-own-poison analysis of Giuliani preparedness disasters, radios could have even come in third, after the strategic miscalculation of flooding the stairwells with hundreds of firefighters when all they could do was rescue the immobile and trapped people who were below the fire. If the radios weren’t the primary or even the secondary cause of fatalities, the commission nonetheless did find, almost despite itself, that they were a “contributing factor.”
As with all the other response failings, the commission’s 102-minute focused report did not comment on any of the radio history that preceded 9/11. But Sam Caspersen did. “The question of why nothing was done about the radios from 1993 to 1998,” when the contract for the new digitals was awarded, “came up in multiple interviews and we never got a good response,” he said later. “The question of why it took three years to get radios into the hands of firefighters in 2001 did not come up precisely because our number one job was to tell what happened that day.”
In any event, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reached a more straightforward conclusion than the commission in 2005. “A preponderance of the evidence indicates that emergency responder lives were likely lost at the WTC resulting from the lack of timely information-sharing and inadequate communications capabilities,” the report stated, with none of the commission’s fuzziness. It said only half of responders “heard radio messages calling for the immediate evacuation of the building.” Usually a master of understatement, NIST approvingly cited a firefighter who said simply, “If communications were better, more firefighters might have lived.”
MOST CALLS FROM World Trade Center occupants that morning were transferred by 9-1-1 operators to fire dispatch, and no unit in the department was more institutionally isolated than the one that interfaced with fire victims. Caspersen found it “very upsetting to listen to phone calls and hear callers transferred to fire dispatch and get put on hold or get lost altogether.” He also found it upsetting that there was “no change” during those 102 minutes in the “stay-put” advice of 9-1-1 operators and fire dispatchers “before the collapse of both towers.” The Times discovered that only 2 of the 130 callers whose taped conversations they reviewed were told to leave. Though the fire chiefs had ordered a full evacuation from the start, the operators and dispatchers, who worked for the police and fire departments respectively, were still reading from the defend-in-place script, whose stay-put premise was disparaged in every 1993 bombing critique.
If the callers did not get useful directions through the operators from the fire chiefs on the scene, it’s equally distressing that the chiefs didn’t hear what the telephone operators were learning about conditions inside the building. Caspersen concluded that “no first responder group”—police or fire—“had the dedicated job of aggregating all of this information” that came in from 9-1-1 and dispatch and “disseminating it to chiefs at the emergency scene” to maximize their understanding of what was going on in the buildings. An internal commission document called it “a ruptured flow of information” in both directions. It particularly lamented that no one had anticipated “that extraordinary circumstances could arise where standard operating procedures”—like stay-where-you-are scripts—“could actually translate to harmful advice.” Philip Zelikow, the commission’s cautious executive director, said the operators “could have saved a number of additional lives if they had known what the people on the scene knew,” meaning the chiefs.14
The identifiable casualties start below the fire—on the 64th and 83rd floors of the North Tower. Eileen Hooey, the wife of a Port Authority executive who died, says that the transcripts “clearly show” that her husband and his coworkers remained on the 64th floor because they “were instructed by both 9-1-1 and the Authority to stay in place.” The commission confirmed that 16 other civilian employees of the Port Authority who could have left at any time instead sealed the doors to their office with tape and waited until 10:12 to leave, having been told repeatedly to remain there. Fourteen died as they finally descended, with two surviving a fall into a void. On the 83rd floor, 13 died after repeatedly asking 9-1-1 operators if the fire was above or below them. This group, trapped by debris, was transferred back and forth several times by dispatchers and told to stay put. It’s unclear that they could have made it out, but the instructions to wait were clearly counterproductive.
But the “disconnection in the 9-1-1 loop,” as John Farmer calls it, had potentially its greatest impact above the fire in the South Tower. The roof was locked, and the only way out was the “debris-cluttered” Stairway A, which did become the path to life for 18 people on the higher floors. The operators told caller after caller from the 25 floors above the fire to stay put. Had they told them to search for an open stairwell, more might have found it. Callers told them a few hundred people were huddled together in South Tower offices, unaware of the order to evacuate because the operators they called were also unaware of it. Asked what to do, one operator said, “I wish I could tell you. I don’t know anything more than what people calling in tell me. I don’t have any access to any radio or TV or anything.” Another said to a fellow operator, “Are they still standing? The World Trade Center is there, right?” As uninformed as they were, the operators remained emphatic right to the end about what the callers should do. When one man just four floors above the fire indicated he was going to try to leave, the dispatcher insisted, “You cannot. You have to wait until somebody comes there.”
The operators also didn’t know that the roof doors were locked, so when Sean Rooney, who worked for Aon on the 98th floor, kept calling, he was never told it was a dead end. Rooney worked his way to the roof, pounding helplessly on the locked door, frustrated by his memories of the 1993 rooftop rescues by police helicopters. “I know this Stairway A was clear,” Rooney’s wife, Beverly Eckert, says. “I just don’t know what prevented him from reaching it. They thought they had the option of going out on the roof. No signs said ‘no rooftop egress.’ In his mind, it’s like ’93; we will be rescued. They never made the place evacuable. I’m in the insurance business and I came to learn that they prevented landings on the roof. They never told anybody that option was foreclosed. If Sean found that one staircase was impassable, he and the others would have kept searching. The belief that they had a rooftop option cost them their lives.
“It took me a while to sort through what Sean was saying. He was mad at the Port Authority and the terrorists. He knew the terrorists had done this. He had colorful things to say about them, and the Port Authority. I heard the explosion and I heard him falling as the floor dropped out from under him. I called his name. The tower was collapsing as I turned to the TV to see with my eyes what I already knew in my heart.”
There are even indications that both the Port Authority and the Fire Department knew about Stairway A. John Mongello, who worked at the authority’s operations desk, said in a recorded transmission that a stairwell was free from the 98th floor down. Ladder 15 firefighter Scott Larsen radioed his lieutenant: “Just got a report from the director of Morgan Stanley. They say the stairway is clear all the way up.”15 There was certainly a way for responders to find out. “It’s so easy,” says John Farmer, “to have someone standing at the bottom of the stairwell asking civilians what floor they came from and what conditions are like. I believe they did that in 1993. That’s something that could have been an easy thing.” Even Rudy Giuliani later indicated that a fire chief told him there was a passable stairway, though he thought it was in the North Tower. “There were people on the 104th floor who walked all the way down,” Giuliani said later, “if they were lucky enough to find the stairs.”
“This lack of information, combined with the general advice to remain where they were,” the 9/11 Commission report said, “may have caused civilians above the impact not to descend, although Stairway A may have been passable.” In fact, an emergency service cop on his way up the South Tower steps just before it collapsed radioed that he’d just seen “a stream of civilians” coming down. Neither the cop nor the civilians survived. Since only 11 of those who died in the South Tower were occupants of below-the-fire floors, this large group obviously came from above the fire. They must have found Stairway A, but only shortly before the collapse, restrained perhaps by the stay-put directions of the 9-1-1 operators.
The death toll above the fire in the South Tower, while half the North Tower number, is twice as frustrating to the families—619 what-ifs. If they’d been told about the open stairway. If they’d been warned that the roof was in lockdown. Even if they’d simply been warned not to wait, but to search for a way down.
While many of the challenges presented by a megafire are daunting, creating an effective information stream to and from dispatchers isn’t. Yet there’s no indication that Von Essen, any of the three Giuliani police commissioners, or the mayor ever so much as considered how to create an informed loop between 9-1-1 operators, fire dispatchers, and on-scene commanders prior to 9/11. During the Giuliani years, the city collected over $250 million in telephone surcharges to upgrade 9-1-1 but diverted the majority of that funding for other budgetary purposes, even in years of huge surpluses. None of the three major improvements that were supposed to be funded by this surcharge, including computer-assisted dispatching, ever occurred, and some were as much as six years behind schedule. Giuliani resisted all efforts, some of which originated within his own administration, to take this mismanaged operation and planned upgrade away from the Police Department, reassigning it to the agency that oversaw information and technological systems. Unifying 9-1-1, Emergency Medical Services, and fire dispatch, as is done in other major cities, was never considered. Instead, Giuliani just let it drift.
One of the forces against any dramatic organizational or personnel change was the Fire Alarm Dispatchers, a small union that endorsed Giuliani in 1993 and 1997. The dispatchers provided security and drivers for the 1993 campaign, according to union president David Rozenzweig. One reason for the union’s clout in Giuliani circles was its long-standing ties to Sheirer. “I’m sure he was involved in the campaign and the endorsement,” Rozenzweig recalled. Sheirer got so close to the Giuliani camp during the campaign that he was asked to play a key role in orchestrating the inaugural, and was immediately promoted at the Fire Department.16
Yet Sheirer, with 22 years of fire dispatch experience, did nothing to close the loop when he rose to the top of the FDNY in the Giuliani era, nor did he when he moved on to the Police Department or the helm of emergency management in the later Giuliani years. As crucial as these emergency communications are—the only connection between the public and public safety—none of OEM’s celebrated drills, before or after Sheirer, rigorously tested the system. Treated like civilian sideshows inside uniformed agencies, the 9-1-1 and dispatch units became unexamined wastelands.
AS MISMANAGED AS the dispatch communications with the victims at the top of the towers were, what was really startling in the aftermath reviews of the response was how badly botched the rescue operation was as well on the ground floor. Chris Young, a 33-year-old temporary worker, was the solitary occupant of an elevator stuck in a North Tower lobby flooded with firefighters.17 He talked with Port Authority staff via intercom twice, and they were passing lists of occupied elevators to the fire command post. Yet no one came. He and the seven people trapped in an adjacent elevator could hear each other and worked out a deal that the first one out would get help for the others. Both Young and the other group kept trying to push and squeeze their way out. When Judith Martin and her companions forced open their double doors after 44 minutes, they walked through a sea of uniforms and told fire officers all about Chris Young. “The rescuers nodded okay, okay,” one of them recalled.
Twenty minutes later, a violent explosion shook Young’s elevator and threw him to the floor. The South Tower had collapsed. The destruction virtually emptied the North Tower lobby of firefighters, but it also disabled the motors that had kept Young’s elevator doors shut. Young tried pushing again, and this time he got out, made his way through a broken window, and, five minutes before the North Tower crashed, evacuated himself. USA Today found that at least 21 people had done the same. It also found that 200 people had died in elevators, many simply trapped. The paper quoted the Port Authority manager who coordinated the intercom calls into the elevators. “A couple of firemen grabbed a couple of different lists,” the manager said, “but I don’t know what happened after that.”
During the 1993 rescue operation, 500 people were trapped in elevators for hours. Elevator mechanics working for the Port Authority began manually releasing the elevators stuck in shafts, sending them to the nearest floor and popping doors open. But the 83 mechanics evacuated after the second plane hit on 9/11, fleeing to locations near the complex. The maintenance supervisor for the mechanics, James O’Neill, says no one asked them to return until an hour after the initial attack, and that he and another supervisor were on their way back to the South Tower when it collapsed. The mechanics also told Elevator World, the industry bible, that they “were instructed by city emergency personnel to get out of the building and safely away from the complex” when they evacuated in the first place. Without the mechanics, the Fire Department was lost.
It had taken four years after the 1993 debacle—when 72 schoolchildren were trapped for hours—for the FDNY to issue a new set of elevator instructions. But the 30-page training bulletin suggested no training. It said the function of the department “is limited to the safe removal of persons trapped in the elevator car” and that the “reactivation of elevators was not to be carried out by firefighters.” As reasonable as that division of labor might appear, it’s often impossible to remove anyone from an elevator unless the car is reactivated and brought to a landing. Firefighters were instructed to hit the “door open” button and the lobby call button. After that, they were told to “summon an elevator mechanic.”
The 9/11 Commission’s Farmer said, “There was no systematic department approach to assisting people in getting out of an elevator.” Caspersen concurred, saying he didn’t believe a Fire Department protocol existed for checking even lobby elevators. “They could have done more to ascertain if people were in the elevators,” said Caspersen. “More creative leaders would have had firefighters checking lobby elevators.” Firefighters are equipped with the Jaws of Life, a tool designed to force open elevator doors, but no one in the North Tower used one to free Chris Young or Judith Martin. A more systematic effort did occur in the South Tower, where firefighters had far less time and had begun using the Jaws to try to rescue a group of people in one elevator, when the tower collapsed, killing everyone.
Legendary fire commissioner John O’Hagan, still the guru of high-rise firefighting three decades after his textbook on it appeared, wrote that elevators had to be immediately “located, entered, and searched even when the fire forces are stretched thin.” Any “compromise in this commitment can result in a loss of life,” he wrote. But when faced with the most urgent need to act on that advice, eight years after a call for strategic change at the same location, the department had no viable plan of action.
“COURAGE ALONE, HOWEVER inspiring, is not always enough,” wrote Tom Von Essen in the final pages of his book. The commissioner’s words were a coda for the deficiencies in city leadership that almost certainly cost the lives of firefighters on 9/11. In contrast to “New York’s Finest,” the paramilitary Police Department with its emphasis on top-down command, the Fire Department revolved around individual firehouses. Firefighters drew their job satisfaction from their relationships with the other men—and it was almost always men—with whom they lived and worked. The culture of the firehouse had been reaffirmed in the 1970s and early 1980s, when arson became endemic in the city’s worst neighborhoods. The firefighters, sometimes stranded in desolate areas of abandoned buildings, racing from one tenement blaze to another and occasionally assaulted by angry mobs eager to take out their antiauthoritarianism on any uniform in sight, had good reason to believe they could count on nothing but their own primal code of honor—to rush into the fire, to save victims, never to abandon a fellow firefighter.
It was a noble legacy, but in an age of skyscrapers and terrorism, it needed to be reined in by a strong leadership that understood that in a large-scale crisis, everyone needed to be coordinated and directed from above. That never happened. “The department has deep cultural roots in the power structure of New York,” said John Lehman, the 9/11 commissioner who focused the most on frontline defense issues. “Rudy Giuliani was not about to impose himself on that structure. This was not just a failing of Rudy; every mayor has made that accommodation.”18 But Giuliani, who had a particularly close relationship with the department, was better positioned both to understand the problems and to enforce a solution. The fact that he never did had tragic consequences when the World Trade Center was attacked.
Giuliani’s first fire commissioner, Howard Safir, was a longtime associate from the mayor’s Justice Department days. Von Essen later described Safir as “a total outsider who knew nothing about our department.” Safir’s entire career was in law enforcement. He even continued to run a private security-consulting firm out of his Virginia house, theoretically on his own time, while serving as New York’s fire commissioner. Everyone understood he was in line to replace Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who had no long-term ties to Giuliani. One deputy mayor described Safir as “police commissioner-in-waiting,” and in late April 1996, he did indeed succeed Bratton.
Safir, who did as little to rock the boat at the Fire Department as possible, was replaced by Von Essen, the first union leader in city history to become the commissioner of his own department. It hardly mattered that Von Essen had flunked the lieutenant’s exam twice and never moved up the promotional ranks a single step. He had accomplished something else of transcendent importance: he delivered his union to Rudy Giuliani in the 1993 election. As rare as it was for a city union to break with an incumbent, Von Essen’s ran Giuliani’s biggest phone banks and dispatched an election-day army of firefighters to polling sites all over the city. “I was mingling at Giuliani’s campaign party,” Von Essen wrote in his book, “and standing not far from him when it was announced that he’d eked out a close victory. When I offered him my congratulations, he hugged me and said, ‘You guys are unbelievable. They were everywhere.’”
Unlike Safir, Von Essen understood the department well and he did have an agenda for change: he wanted to take on the power of the fire chiefs, who were represented by a union that backed Dinkins, the Uniformed Fire officers Association. Von Essen pointed out—with some accuracy—that while the chiefs were a critical part of the department management structure, they were protected by tenure, promoted by test, untrained as managers, and accountable to no one. He derided his own department in his private 9/11 Commission testimony, comparing it unfavorably to other agencies. “OEM was a meritocracy,” he said, “unlike the FDNY.”
In a foreword for Von Essen’s book, Giuliani wrote that “Tom reformed a department that had remained largely unchanged since its inception.” Yet Von Essen’s solitary claim to reform in the 288-page memoir was that he reassigned a dozen chiefs from administrative to field duties, so small a revolution that even Giuliani couldn’t turn it into a sound bite. Giuliani also praised Von Essen for “record low civilian casualties,” but that was hardly a product of Fire Department reform, given the fact that the number of fires was down 46 percent.
Von Essen was in many ways one of the most introspective of Giuliani’s team, and his post-9/11 assessments of the department’s performance were stark and intelligent. But he was also commissioner for five and a half years and did nothing to put together a real plan to handle high-rise fires except issue a new circular that changed little. Though he always maintained that firefighter safety was his top issue, he left intact a safety battalion without any structural engineers, manned by fire officers who learned how to evaluate potential collapses by riding around with a veteran chief and watching him do it.19 His department also did nothing to support Fire Marshal Ronnie Bucca’s efforts to become the sole FDNY representative on the FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Force—attempts that were rebuffed by the police, even though Bucca had a top security clearance and an encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic fundamentalists.20 Asked about access to threat information by commission investigators, Von Essen, whose department had every reason to be included since it led the response to the 1993 bombing, said he was “told nothing at all.” At the end of the long day of the terror attacks, Von Essen said he started hearing “talk of an organization called al Qaeda and a man named Osama bin Laden.” But, he wrote, “it meant nothing to me.”
And Giuliani, the one-obsession-at-a-time mayor, spent virtually no time worrying about the department’s ossified command and planning structure. The index of his memoir contains 43 pages of pre-9/11 references to the Police Department versus 1 page for the Fire Department, noting merely that he met weekly with the fire commissioner. He did create OEM, which was both a by-product of and a boon to the Fire Department, because it was a check on police emergency power. But his focus was on crime fighting, where he was making a national reputation for bringing down the felony rate. There was no way for Giuliani to believably lay claim to the nationally plummeting fire fatality numbers. So he let the Fire Department become a sleepy backwater of patronage and paralysis.
NO FIRE CHIEF was more celebrated after 9/11—in moving Newsweek and New Yorker portraits—than the legendary Bill Feehan, a four-decade veteran who’d held every position in the department, including commissioner. A John Wayne style protagonist who would not even use a touch-tone telephone, Feehan believed it was important for soldiers and firemen “not to know too much.” They had to “act on blind faith” without measuring the odds.
Feehan raced to the attack scene on 9/11 in a car of chiefs, watching the fire in stoic silence. They did not talk strategy; they knew feet and faith would drive the response, like they always had. The minute they pulled up to the towers, Feehan’s driver started telling people to “get out of here” because the tower was “coming down.” It was a prophetic warning, and hardly the only one from the FDNY. Yet, an hour later, when the South Tower did fall, the doughty Feehan turned to his stunned fellow firefighters and asked, “You expect this is going to happen twice?” He was standing with special operations chief Ray Downey, who’d predicted a collapse just like Feehan’s driver. Belatedly convinced that their command post, on West Street opposite the towers, was vulnerable, Feehan, Downey and Pete Ganci, the top uniformed leaders of the department, ordered it moved north, farther away from the only tower left. Ganci also began issuing radio commands for firefighters in the North Tower to evacuate at 10:15, repeating it five times. But then, the three chiefs, a hundred years of combined experience, went south themselves, closer to the remaining tower.
“I’m going to take a walk down there,” Ganci was heard saying as they charged into the dust. The three men picking their way through the rubble embodied the stout fearlessness of the department—as well as its lack of a plan that went much beyond walking directly toward danger. For one thing, many firefighters weren’t abiding by the central assumption that Ganci and Feehan had determined would guide the response from the very beginning: that it was impossible to put out the fire or to save anyone on the floors above the blaze. The Fire officer’s Handbook of Tactics says that “even a light load fire” in a 30,000-square-foot floor—and this was five 40,000-square-foot floors—“is beyond the scope of manual firefighting.” If the wishes of the top chiefs had been communicated down the line or followed by those who heard them, firefighters would have focused solely on rescuing people who were stuck on the floors below. Yet lower-ranking officers were sending their men up into the towers—and to their deaths—with orders to extinguish a blaze that their superiors had deemed utterly uncontrollable.
The absence of a real plan tailored to megafires—along with the predicted communications chasm—were precursors for the disparate response. Some of the department’s missteps were understandable because of the shocking magnitude of the attack; others were an indictment of its readiness and competence. The commission’s final assessment couldn’t have been worse: “Certainly, the FDNY was not ‘responsible for the management of the City’s response to the emergency,’ as the Mayor’s directive would have required.” Significant shortcomings within the department’s command and control capabilities “were painfully exposed,” said the commission.
Nicholas Scoppetta, the Bloomberg-appointed fire commissioner and longtime Giuliani friend, testified at a 2002 City Council hearing that “there would be a dramatic difference” in how the department would handle a “similar occurrence” today. “That would be certainly in deployment of resources, deployment of personnel, staging of personnel, and I think the entire strategic approach to an incident like that would be different,” he said.
After the 1993 bombing, for instance, the department was well aware that one big evacuation problem involved the rescue of handicapped, severely overweight, or otherwise immobile people. It was a major issue that arose in fire journals, after-action reports, and even the World Trade Center Task Force report issued in 1995 by Giuliani’s buildings and fire commissioners. But nothing was done to formalize a better plan, and when the WTC was attacked again the rescuers had nothing to guide them but their own instincts. So some firefighters diverted people who were slowing down the evacuation of others to waiting areas. As many as 40 to 60 people were sequestered between the 12th and 20th floors of the North Tower. Some stayed there until they died.21
The stockpiling of the impaired on “holding floors” appeared inconsistent with the prime purpose of the department’s ascent, which, as Ganci and the chiefs determined it, was to rescue those who couldn’t get themselves out. Since such sequestering never happened in the South Tower, it was also an impromptu decision, implemented in the glaring absence of so much as a single sentence about the disabled in the high-rise manual issued by the department in 1997. Many of the impaired were actually kept on the same floors where large numbers of ascending firefighters were resting.
Meanwhile, some evacuees were helping them make their way downstairs. This was particularly manageable with lightweight evacuation chairs that slid down the stairs, but the firefighters apparently had no idea of where they could be found. The only people known to have been carried down on these chairs were Port Authority employees.22
There was no single story on 9/11 more tragic than that of paraplegic Ed Beyea and his friend Abe Zelmanowitz. The two Blue Cross computer analysts waited on the 27th floor for nearly all the 102 minutes, seeking help to carry Beyea’s heavy, motorized wheelchair down the stairs. Zelmanowitz told his brother Jack on the phone shortly after the plane hit, “We’re just waiting for assistance. Firemen will come and help us down.” They did come—streaming past them on the way up. An elevator was working up to the 24th floor for some of the time the two men were waiting—Beyea unable to move, Zelmanowitz rejecting all suggestions that he leave his friend behind. In the end, the two men died in the tower, along with Captain William Burke, who sent his men down and stayed with Beyea and Zelmanowitz in a last-minute effort to get them out. Burke’s sister, Janet Roy, who pieced together a chronology from the surviving members of his unit, says they were “trying to figure out where the specific chair you use for evacuation was.”
Another captain whose unit was on the 27th floor, Jay Jonas, rushed down after the South Tower collapse, having seen it from the window with Burke. Jonas’s company stopped their own descent to pick up Josephine Harris, who was also impaired, and the delay in carrying her down almost cost those in Jonas’s company their lives. They only made it to the fourth floor but survived in a free fall.
There was neither a standard procedure nor an order that morning making it clear what companies were to do with the impaired occupants they came across. Burke’s unit never stopped in the lobby for any sort of orders. Captain Jay Jonas’s unit did, and he was told: “Just go upstairs and do the best you can.”23
THE SCORECARD OF Fire Department errors that jeopardized its own brave men—without considering civilian lives—is a challenge for change. The agony of the loss has for too long silenced the litany. Even when the investigators from the commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and McKinsey uncovered terrible truths, they often shrank from the tough language that might have jarred a city, a nation, and especially a fire department, to greater reform. With the Victim Compensation Fund offering millions of dollars and a form of closure, all of the responder and civilian families who accepted the compensation forfeited their right to sue the city. The handful that didn’t take the compensation focused their lawsuits on the airlines and others, not filing against the city. Because of these very individual decisions, no one in command from the city—from Giuliani to Sheirer to Von Essen—will ever be deposed about the city’s fatal failings in the lead-up to attack or on that day. The only lawsuits against the city that remain revolve around post-9/11 toxic exposure and respiratory damage. Yet the widows and children of the 421 responders who died have to live with the question of whether their loss was due to municipal malfunction as well as distant madmen.
In Giuliani’s appearance at the commission’s 2004 hearing, he tried to make any discussion of what he conceded were “mistakes” unpatriotic, insisting that “our anger should clearly be directed, and the blame should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones.” Bob Kerrey was the only commissioner who dared to disagree. “I do not believe it’s an either/or choice of being angry at those who perpetrated this crime and feeling anger toward those with responsibility,” he said. Kerrey later said, “I think the mayor should be held responsible for not having a plan for a crash.” While Kerrey was the sole commissioner to raise questions about Giuliani’s deflecting single-mindedness, staff director Philip Zelikow delivered a similar message in a radio interview in 2004. Asked whether the blame lay only with the terrorists, Zelikow replied, “Mayor Giuliani has expressed that very well. Of course, the people who are responsible for these deaths ultimately are the killers, but it’s still our job to do what we can to mitigate their damage.”24
Instead of mitigating the damage, the city’s response added to it in ways far beyond the absence of working radios or preplans. Not only had the city done nothing since 1993 to prepare for an event as predictable as a mega high-rise fire, it acted on “instinct,” as Sam Caspersen described it, once the inevitable happened. No coherent firefighting strategy emerged in the course of the nearly two-hour response. “You have to have a plan for major incidents and they didn’t have one,” Caspersen said. The deadliest consequence of this strategic void was that 500 to 600 firefighters climbed the stairs, even though the top chiefs had decided at the outset that all the department could do was a search and rescue operation. “The Fire Department errs on the side of putting too many people in harm’s way than too few,”
Caspersen observed. “They were going to flood the tower. They had no idea of incident management. The thumb didn’t know what the little finger was doing. They had no idea how many firefighters were there.”
Caspersen doesn’t think it was a matter of chaos caused by crisis; he ascribes it to “no standard-operating-procedure protocol beforehand.” Cate Taylor agreed with her colleague: “Why were they sending all these engine companies up?” Taylor asked, pointing out that engine companies are supposed to put out fires. The World Trade Center operation had already been determined by Pete Ganci to be a rescue mission, the job of ladder companies. “We asked and never got an answer. It was not due to chaos. The chiefs were sending them up. There was a certain amount of control, a kind of fraternity thing, and everybody wanted to do something. There was no reason for all those engine companies. We got a lot of chaos-of-the-day type answers.”
One of the reasons engine companies were ascending, however, was that chiefs were giving firefighters a mixed message, even though the top command had decided the fire could not be extinguished. “Some firefighters believed that this was primarily a fire-fighting mission,” said Caspersen, “and others believed it was a rescue mission. A uniform, clear plan was not conveyed to each engine company and ladder company that ascended the stairs.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology described “a trinity of operational strategies”—with the top chiefs trying to evacuate those below the fires, the building chiefs hoping to cut a path through the fires to rescue occupants above the fires, and the company-level captains actually believing they could put out the fires. “These three operations strategies highlight differences that may be attributed to years of experience, level of training, and institutional focus of the various command levels,” NIST said. “As the senior command level operational strategies were communicated to the lower levels, the concepts appeared to take hold at a slower pace at the next level down.”
The top chiefs were “correct,” the NIST report found, that the fires “were too large and too high” to be fought, especially with a ruptured water supply: “In some cases firefighters were persuaded by higher ranking officers to switch from the idea of firefighting to evacuation and rescue operations.” But “some firefighters at the company level were disturbed by the operations orders that signaled a change toward assisting with the evacuation,” and “wanted to go up and put the fires out.” So, even though these “company officers were given information defining their mission” as evacuation, several continued to see “the event as a very large and dangerous yet still conventional high-rise fire” that they would find a way to extinguish.
Apparently, command within the department was so uncertain that only chiefs with talk-show host persuasiveness could control the situation. It wasn’t just the 160 off-duty firefighters who rushed to the scene, propelled by their own fraternal loyalties. The chiefs and officers in charge of buildings and companies freelanced as well, putting firefighters on stairs with objectives contrary to the top command.
Frank Gribbon, the Fire Department spokesman on 9/11, offered the department’s grisly calculus: “The commander at the scene would calculate the risks to the firefighters against the number of lives that could be saved.” Of course, Ganci and lobby chiefs, as Caspersen points out, had no way to know precisely “how many civilians were trapped but in a position where they could be rescued.” Caspersen conceded he couldn’t estimate, “even with 20/20 hindsight, what would have been an appropriate number of firefighters for each tower.” But Ganci and Feehan both said that they couldn’t put the fire out or save anyone above it. The lobby chiefs “also knew from building personnel that some civilians were trapped in elevators and on specific floors,” the commission report observed. With that information, wouldn’t the narrow goal of rescuing the impaired or trapped require far fewer than 600 firefighters? Isn’t it a job more for a platoon than for an army? And didn’t this excessive number of ascending firefighters add to the radio mess, dramatically boosting transmissions that “stepped on each other” and consequently could not be heard? That’s why a single, disciplined, definition of mission was so crucial to the rational dispatching of manpower. Instead, chiefs in the lobby were saying simply, “Do the best you can,” to captains who checked in for instructions.
The doubts about the management of firefighters that day echo those of Tom Von Essen, who said he had been “convinced that we often sent too many guys into fires” since his “early days on the job.” Von Essen told the Times in 2002: “I’ve been a firefighter since 1970, and have often stood on floors where we needed 10 people and had 30. There’s a lack of control that’s dangerous on an everyday basis to firefighters.” Von Essen’s admonition in his own book—that “the time may come when we have to hold back or limit our response”—was triggered by his desire “to protect the men who will respond to the next call.” It was also a result of his belief that “too often, we sent men into fires without giving them all the training and discipline we could.”
Traumatized by the mass grave of firefighters at Ground Zero, Von Essen said that he couldn’t “stop asking questions,” even whether “more men, even one man, might have been saved” had the department functioned better. “I don’t think we can answer any of those questions conclusively,” he decided. But he ruefully referred to the “temptation to postpone hard thinking and planning for such threats” and warned that “the next time we need to be ready beforehand.”
Of course, the tragedy wasn’t just the mistake of sending the men in; it was the botched effort to get them out, especially after the South Tower fell. Somewhere between 125 and 200 firefighters died inside the North Tower. In his testimony, Giuliani portrayed them as choosing to ignore the imminent peril in order to help civilians who otherwise would have been left behind on their own. “I know one firefighter whose family has explained this to me. He was in the North Tower. He was evacuating people. He was given an evacuation order. He told his men to go. He was with a person in a wheelchair, and an overweight person, so he stayed with them. So how did he interpret that evacuation order? He interpreted that order, ‘I’ll get all my men out but I’m going to stay here and help these people out.’ And the fact that so many of them interpreted it that way kept [it] a much calmer situation and a much better evacuation.”
There may well have been special circumstances—like Captain Burke’s decision to stay with Beyea and Zelmanowitz—when a responder made that heroic calculation. But Giuliani is using an exception to conceal a failing. The National Institute of Standards and Technology found that half of the firefighters who died in the North Tower never got the order to evacuate. And of those who did hear it, many may not have understood its import. Of the 58 firefighters who escaped and did oral histories, 54 said they did not know that the South Tower had fallen, including many who heard a radio warning omitting that information. Sam Caspersen says that “the most important” Fire Department radio failing wasn’t “technical” but was the “content of the message” on their radios. He names police captain Henry Winkler as one of the “top five heroes of the day” because, as soon as the South Tower collapsed, his instant evacuation order informed everyone on Police Department radios that it had toppled. Most Fire Department evacuation orders never said that; they just gave the order to evacuate without conveying the astonishing urgency of it. Though department evacuation protocols require a constant repetition of “mayday, mayday, mayday,” that did not happen between collapses, either.
Instead of staying behind to rescue civilians—almost all of whom had already fled the North Tower by the time the South Tower collapsed—many firefighters were simply exhausted, collecting in large groups on the 19th floor and elsewhere. Even though the top chiefs had determined that the fires could not be extinguished, most firefighters went up in full firefighting gear, carrying over a hundred pounds, making themselves slower than many of the overweight and handicapped people they were sent to aid. Commission staffer Delgrosso was exasperated by the insistence of engine company firefighters that they “lug around fifty feet of hose” even though the buildings had their own hose. “There were also firefighter lockers every five floors with extra masks, air packs, oxygen, poles,” said Delgrosso. “I can’t tell you how many chiefs said: ‘we wouldn’t use their equipment.’ The Fire Department didn’t even know where the equipment lockers were. Other than the local engine company, no one else knew.”
“A lot of companies had taken rests at about every fourth or fifth floor,” one firefighter told NIST, “because we kept passing one another. It was very hot in the stairway, especially with all our gear and hood on, with no ventilation. I ended up going up to the 19th floor.”
A Port Authority worker said, “I saw those firemen on the 27th floor. They were totally exhausted. They basically crawled onto the floor. That’s why I ran and got them water.” NIST found several cases of firefighters suffering from chest pains and heart attacks. During rests, the firefighters took off their turnout coats, which act as a thermal insulator and contributed to the physical drain.
Too many firefighters carrying too much equipment: it was a formula for fatalities. William Walsh, from Ladder Company 1, heard the evacuation order and walked down, pausing at the 19th floor to warn firefighters “hanging out in the stairwell” and on the floor. “I told them ‘Didn’t you hear the mayday? Get out.’ They were saying ‘Yeah, we’ll be right with you.’ They just didn’t give it a second thought. They just continued with their rest.” Of course, like Walsh, the resting firefighters had no idea the South Tower was gone.25
Deputy Chief Charles Blaich raised questions about the department’s evacuation at a forum in January 2002, stirring a brief media furor. Praising the firefighters who went into the towers, he said, “There has to be a level somewhere saying, ‘That’s wonderful, now get out of here.’ There has to be someone to make that hard call.” Blaich said the department “lost track” of the firefighters who went up, affirming what the commission would find—namely, that “the FDNY as an institution proved incapable of coordinating the number of units dispatched.” The only chief to publicly cast doubt on the management of the Fire Department evacuation, Blaich later claimed he was penalized for his candor.
In addition to the losses suffered because too many went in and too few got the word to get out, the National Institute of Standards and Technology report estimates that 160 responders died outside the towers, a particularly inexcusable loss. Firefighters gathered, for example, in droves at the undamaged Marriott Hotel, known as 3 WTC, adjacent to the North Tower and right in front of the South Tower. Even after both towers were engulfed in flame, at least 60 firefighters stayed in the 22-story hotel. Nearly an hour after dozens of buildings much farther away were emptied, responders, hotel staff, and civilians still milled around the Marriott, oblivious to the danger above. With its own separate and working power system, the Marriott allowed teams of firefighters to ride repeatedly to the top, theoretically making sure the 940 guests had left.
There were actually more firefighters in the Marriott than there were in the South Tower when it collapsed, though few had been sent to the hotel by command. In fact, Deputy Chief Tom Galvin, who was dispatched to the South Tower to take over as incident commander after the second plane hit, decided to get there through the hotel, and wound up getting “bogged down in there,” as he put it in his oral history. He sent several units up to the floors to do another round of searches. Since the hotel was the “safest way” into the towers from West Street, according to Galvin, “everybody seemed to be coming in through it and there were a lot of companies in there.”
The commission reported that 14 units were in the Marriott, while the South Tower, unlike the North Tower, was so short of companies that another alarm went out at 9:37 for more firefighters. When the collapsing South Tower cut the hotel in half at 9:59, it was an hour and 11 minutes after the Marriott began its own evacuation. There was no reason for 20 firefighters to still be on the upper floors, or for 16 of them to die. There was no reason for 50 civilians to still be in the restaurant. The hotel proved a doubly costly diversion when a second group of firefighters entered it to rescue those trapped under South Tower debris, and the North Tower collapsed on them.
Like a chain reaction pileup, the companies that were dispatched by the 9:37 alarm, which was prompted by the Marriott glut and the South Tower shortage, went to command posts and staging areas that were too close to the towers. They got there by 9:55 and suffered losses in both collapses, arriving too late to be of any use to anyone. While the location of these posts has been excused because the chiefs had no reason to anticipate unprecedented total collapses, the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the same chiefs regarded “localized collapses in and above the fire zones” as “likely.” Since a few falling floors would kill, too, “localized collapses” were clearly sufficient cause to set up posts farther away. Even Von Essen, who went to West Street, said later, “Certainly our command post was not far enough away from the scene as it should have been.”
NIST found that “almost all emergency responder departments”—including police, fire, and Emergency Medical Services—“established their command posts within the potential collapse zone of the buildings” and that these decisions were consistent with their department procedures. It recommended that “command posts should be established outside the potential collapse footprint of any building which shows evidence of large multi-floor fires or has serious structural damage.”
While the 9/11 Commission put no hard number on the out-of-tower responder deaths, it said many died in the Marriott, on the neighboring streets where the posts were, and on the concourse. Strangely, fleeing civilians also reported seeing many firefighters in the lobby of the North Tower shortly before its collapse, even though the South Tower had already fallen and the North Tower command post had long since been abandoned.
Instinct reigned in the minutes after the South Tower fell. Forty-three more units, with hundreds more firefighters, were dispatched to the scene between the South Tower collapse at 9:59 and the North Tower collapse at 10:29. Twenty-nine units arrived. Within seconds of being informed that “the entire building has collapsed,” Manhattan dispatch was telling six engine companies to take the West Side Highway down to West and Vesey Streets, right next to the remaining tower. When the dust cloud in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel lifted at 10:14, “all units” were sent to the South Tower site. At 10:26, two minutes before the North Tower collapse, fire units on the scene asked for “all the help we can get,” and dispatch responded, “Ten-four. We have multiple units on the way in now.” Port Authority Police Chief Joe Morris later said, “In a way, thank God the buildings went down when they did because you had 500 more people ready to go into the buildings.”26
The courage contagion ran to the top of the department as well. Of the department’s 32-member executive staff, 26 went to the incident, even though, reported McKinsey, “many had no role or responsibility” and might have been “better able to support” the effort “from a protected location with appropriate communication infrastructure.”
CAPTAIN AL FUENTES, who went with Bill Feehan, Pete Ganci, and Ray Downey as they walked through the swirling dust of the South Tower’s collapse, said later that they had to make their way “over multiples of ten, fifteen and twenty foot mounds of debris on West Street.”27 This group, too, was heading for the Marriott. As they walked toward it, a chief fleeing the hotel told Downey that there were civilians and firefighters trapped there. Ganci radioed back from the corner of West and Liberty, right beside the Marriott, asking for “two of my best trucks.” Downey headed inside to try to help people get out, leaving Fuentes on the street to signal people when no debris was falling and it was safe to leave. The city’s top technical chief, who’d gone out to Oklahoma City to help orchestrate the response to that bombing collapse, Downey disappeared into a hotel that had already become a tomb. Fuentes couldn’t see him anymore and moved closer to the deathtrap himself just as the North Tower collapsed. He miraculously survived, but the brain trust of Downey, Feehan, and Ganci perished.
Crushed on West Street outside the Marriott while lifting rock in his bare hands to reach an obese woman, Feehan symbolized the department’s historic reliance on action over direction, valor over cautious command. He died a hero, as did every firefighter who raced into the towers that day and never returned. All of them would have chosen survival, had they been given the information, equipment, plan, and instructions that could have saved their lives.
Yet, pressed at his private appearance before the 9/11 Commission staff about the command and control breakdown on September 11, Giuliani blithely stated, “It was not a major problem.”
Chaos and a mere 102 minutes to act do explain some of these blunders. But so do truculence and eight years of inaction. Defend-in-place and get-to-the-fire were senseless bromides substituting for judgment that day, as well as in the years that led up to it. Firefighters and civilians died because others failed—both to plan and to execute.
Giuliani concedes, as he did before the commission in 2004, that the response was “not flawless, not without mistakes.” But these are caveats, not confessions. He’s never so much as hinted at anything he or his administration might have done that multiplied the casualties. It’s as if the moment we met the enemy was the first time we could have considered any of the obvious: the trade center as a target; a high-rise fire plan; emergency communications systems that worked for firefighters and fire victims; strategies that took into account roofs, stairways, elevators, and the impaired.
The mayor’s destructive speculation that the North Tower firefighters deliberately sacrificed themselves was the kind of eulogy that leads only to more eulogies. “Rather than giving us a story of uniformed men fleeing, while civilians were left behind, which would have been devastating to the morale of this country,” he said, “they gave us an example of very, very brave men and women in uniform who stand their ground to protect civilians.” The best rebuttal comes from Giuliani’s own partner, Von Essen: “We also need to expand our conception of what a firefighter’s duty is, beyond the image of the lone, heroic man facing the flame with only a hose and his own courage. It’s a horrible reality that this new world will demand both great courage and the discipline to temper that zeal if necessary. Finding the right balance will be the never-ending duty of chiefs, captains, and every leader in the firehouse, even at the risk, sometimes, of upsetting their own people.”