AFTER NEARLY 35 years in the New York City Fire Department and two as its highest-ranking uniformed officer, Anthony Fusco was finally ready to retire in 1993. But he had one last job he wanted to do. When terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in February of that year, Fusco had managed the operation—the largest incident in his department’s 128-year history. He was proud of what the firefighters had done. “We didn’t lose another person after the six in the initial blast even though the smoke conditions were horrible,” he remembered. “We had to reach over walls. We had many rescue situations. It was very fulfilling. It was the most rewarding incident I’d been to.”
As a legacy, Fusco produced two detailed accounts of the successes and shortcomings of that operation. They were published at the end of 1993, shortly before Rudy Giuliani took office. He wanted the reports, which included articles by him and others in the department’s top echelon, to shape preparation for future terror attacks, so he and his colleagues pulled no punches. The question “Was there something we could say that would improve operations?” was what drove him. The list of issues he detailed eight years before the terrorists would strike again was chilling in its prophetic aura.
Fusco and his colleagues had seen something in 1993 that cried out for changing the way cities thought about handling worst-case fires in enormous skyscrapers. They weren’t the only ones. The National Fire Protection Association and the Building officials and Code Administrators International sent a team to the site immediately, and they produced a 59-page study focused, for the first time, on “mega high-rise fires.” Prior to the incident, no one treated megastructures any differently than other high-rises, said the report, but it was now time to ask if that should change. Urging a rethinking of the defend-in-place strategy, the staid industry groups also concluded that megabuildings “are not designed to be totally evacuated in an emergency” and called for a code and tactical revolution.
As sobering as the entire analysis was, the hot-button item highlighted by the 1993 bombing was the war of the badges, particularly triggered by the police helicopter rescues on the roof of a tower. The hostility was so intense during the 1993 evacuation that Alan Reiss of the Port Authority “observed a confrontation between the FDNY and the NYPD that almost deteriorated into physical violence.”1 Reiss attributed the incident to the fact that the rooftop rescues were done without consulting the fire chiefs. Fusco wrote that the unauthorized landings “put lives in danger” and “caused friction.” The dispute would rankle for years to come.
The Fire Chiefs Association attacked the airlift as “sheer grandstanding, a cheap publicity stunt done at the expense of public safety.” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly took the polar opposite view. He testified before a March 1993 congressional hearing that at least 30 people were evacuated to safety, including a pregnant woman who was flown to a hospital and gave birth immediately. Kelly’s spokeswoman fired back at the chiefs’ letter, calling it “absolutely ludicrous,” and charging that the chiefs were engaging in a “petty turf battle” that did “a disservice to the people of the city.” The commanding officer of the aviation division, William Wilkens, crowed, “There were many surprised and exhausted firefighters who, after climbing up 80 flights, were met by fresh police rescue teams coming down the stairs.”
Fusco tried to steer the controversy in a constructive direction by pushing for joint aviation rescue drills that included police and fire rooftop operations. There had been no such exercises for years. “It’s just human nature,” Fusco said later. “People who know each other have a much better chance of cooperating in emergencies. The more a stranger you are to each other, the more you’re going to stay within your unit and do whatever you can. We felt that one of the big problems in 1993 was that the training together was somewhat neglected.” A City Hall meeting to discuss helicopter protocols was held in 1993, including the mayor’s office, police, fire, and other agencies, Fusco recalled. Then both departments eventually published their own, separate, rule changes.
The Fire Department’s regulations said rooftop rescues could be undertaken only at the direction of the Fire Department incident commander, and it wanted the police to let fire personnel do the work. The revised police manual provided that a fire chief would be airlifted to the roof if landings were planned, but also described circumstances when rescues would be attempted without FDNY involvement. The dispute—which required integrated training and drilling to resolve—was still way up in the air when the Dinkins administration departed at the end of 1993.
But it wasn’t just helicopters and separate command posts that fed the competitive animosity. In 1993, police chief Lou Anemone recalls, there was “a Mexican stand-off over the bodies.” He says the police set up a temporary morgue in the nearby Vista hotel and planned to bring the bodies discovered in the basement there, but the Fire Department wanted to put them in ambulances. When a lieutenant informed him of the dispute, Anemone wanted to know—why ambulances?
“He told me he thought it had something to do with the cameras, which were right by the ambulances,” Anemone contends. “So I went to the chiefs in the basement and we got into a disagreement over who was in command at that point of the incident. I said: ‘You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out this is a crime scene. Are you shitting me? The fire is out.’ I insisted the bodies had to go to the morgue, that we were not sending them to five different hospitals. So finally we agreed that two of my guys and two of their guys would carry each body out, and that I and the chief would lead the way up and out. When we got up to that point where you had to turn either toward the ambulances or toward the Vista morgue, we were pulling in both directions. But we got them to the morgue. They were disappointed there were no cameras.”
This was the stunning state of emergency planning when Rudy Giuliani took office. Fusco anticipated the future so well that he closed one of his articles with a reference to the June bombing plot. “It didn’t take long for the specter of an even larger disaster to be raised,” he wrote warily. “In June, four months after the WTC attack, police arrested a group of suspected terrorist conspirators in Queens.” Then he listed their targets, some of which would have involved consuming high-rise fires. He called for an “awareness of the need for preplanning and command organization beyond the scale” of anything the Fire Department and the city had ever before envisioned.
“The bombing, to me, was a violation on the soil of the United States,” said Fusco, who volunteered for the service as soon as he turned 18 so he could fight in the Korean War. “It hadn’t happened before. If they thought they were successful, even to a small degree, I thought they would probably say, ‘Well, we’ll do more in this area.’ I thought the World Trade Center would be a particular target. Yes, definitely, I thought that. Just like the civil disturbances of the 60’s, I viewed terrorist activities as the next major issue facing the fire department.”
But the new administration wasn’t listening to these warnings. When it came to emergencies, it had its own, peculiar, priorities.
TWENTY-ONE DAYS into Rudy Giuliani’s first term at City Hall, a water main broke in Brooklyn. It happened at 1:30 A.M. and Giuliani found out at 5:30 A.M., watching TV news at Gracie Mansion. The gusher in middle-class Carroll Gardens turned a Brooklyn street “into a raging river,” said the Daily News. The resulting explosion at Gracie Mansion led, eventually, to the creation of the office of Emergency Management. The 24-hour-mayor was outraged that he was out of the loop for four hours and that reporters knew about a city emergency before he did. He got to the scene by 7 A.M., just as the rising half-million gallons of floodwater caused a street to collapse, breaching a second main and creating a half-block-long crater. Soon the river was a sheet of ice. The Department of Environmental Protection had to locate 60 valves beneath eight inches of ice to shut the main down.
A subhead in the Daily News story captured what would become an earmark of Giuliani governance. It simply said “Rudy on scene.” At one point, said the News, he directed rescue workers who were removing a 94-year-old man trapped in his house. With 340 homes affected, some caked in mud, Giuliani went back and forth to the site for days, even hosting a community meeting there. He instantly threw his brand-new government into high gear about both fixing the burst main and making sure he would never again have to learn from TV that something bad was happening in his city.
First Deputy Mayor Peter Powers had already become a student of the city’s response practices. Powers had been Giuliani’s top operative in the transition with the Dinkins administration, and he had raised questions with Dinkins deputy mayor Norman Steisel about emergency management. Steisel said Powers indicated that they “wanted to have an emergency agency of their own and understood the public relations value to the mayor.” Powers told him that “the mayor has to be involved” and that he “never wanted to have a situation where the mayor doesn’t know what’s going on,” a not-too-subtle reference to the out-of-the-loop Dinkins of the ’93 bombing and other major incidents. Steisel said Powers had questions about how to staff such an agency and was acutely aware that the “public perception was that the police department really ran emergencies,” a perception Giuliani seemed determined to change. “I knew when Peter had an intense interest and he did in this issue,” said Steisel. “But was it terrorism that interested him? Or did the threat to the World Trade Center? No. He was interested in gaining mayoral control of emergencies.”
So the first official communication in Giuliani City Hall that is labeled “Emergency Response Coordination” is a memo from Powers to the mayor dated January 24, 1994. “As we have discussed,” Powers begins, “the Brooklyn water main break in Carroll Gardens has highlighted that the City’s response in emergency situations should be improved.” The areas Powers says “should be addressed” included “24-hour City Hall emergency response coordination” and “the need to clearly define the notification process, particularly Mayoral notification.” He was also concerned about making sure that “the City Hall press office coordinated the media response.”
There actually already was an office of Emergency Management. It was run by a police commander and it had not covered itself in glory during the water main break. A representative didn’t get to the scene until 6:30 A.M., and even then went to a nearby tunnel entrance. So Powers’s memo said there was a need “to recognize that other city agencies may be more adept than the police in coordinating non-enforcement emergencies.” This was the earliest indication that the new administration was rethinking the longtime city plan of allowing the Police Department to oversee interagency management of all city emergencies.
Powers reviewed two possible approaches: a 50-to 60-member Emergency Response Team, which, he noted, Giuliani had suggested, or a 5-to 7-member Emergency Response Unit of “highly qualified individuals.” In either case, staff from other agencies would be assigned to City Hall on rotations so that someone would be on duty at all times. Their responsibilities would include “monitoring all police desk calls, determining who should be contacted, and responding to an emergency scene, where appropriate, with the understanding of all involved that they represent you.” Suddenly refocused on fighting a succession of snowstorms, Giuliani didn’t respond until February 15. In a handwritten note to Powers, he decided to “train 20 people to do this to start with—no overtime.” He wanted it going by that weekend, and it was. By Friday the 18th, Powers had named a full team from four agencies, none of them police or fire, and dubbed it “the emergency notification and response system at City Hall.” He appointed Bill Motherway, the risk manager from the office of Operations who’d assessed the water main response, to head it.
The whole operation was rushed together so quickly that few involved understood just what they were supposed to do. In early March, Powers asked the Emergency Response Team officer on duty about an emergency situation and, as Motherway put it in a memo, was “rather upset to discover that, not only was the individual unsure of the incident, but unsure of his actual purpose.” Motherway said it was “imperative” that the team leaders from other agencies “ensure that all assigned to the ERT understand the procedures.” Any failure “to do so will probably result in us splitting the nine weekly shifts ourselves,” warned Motherway, who called that possibility “a fate worse than death.”
Motherway could not talk about the ERT in an interview years later without breaking out in gales of laughter. “I usually stayed in Peter Powers’ office” all night, he said. “They insisted that ERT had to be staffed by commissioners, deputy commissioners or assistant commissioners. They didn’t even want directors; they wanted seasoned people bright enough to make a decision. You’d work a full day at your agency, then do the ERT shift from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. I was mayor one night a week. Our responsibility was to find out what happened, then consider should we notify the mayor or make a decision on it. It was Rudy’s first foray into trying to take control of the whole emergency thing. He wanted to know what was going on at all times. It’s not like we walked around in gear and saved people. We kept a big logbook. Someone, I’m not sure who, looked at it.”
The initial list of procedures forwarded from Powers to Giuliani fit on a page. The pivotal instruction was to be prepared to answer questions from Powers or Giuliani about any incident. Archived notes from an ERT protocol meeting months later show a hand-drawn chart with information passing along arrow lines from Police Operations to the ERT member to “RWG” [Giuliani] and Powers. The scrawl on the side added: “What does RWG want to know about? When to wake him up?” The incident sheets listed nine major forms of emergency that the group was to track, including “major structural fires, explosions and hazardous material incidents,” quickly moving the team’s interests beyond the water main fiascoes that prompted it.
Powers always saw this as merely a bridge to the larger agency he’d discussed with Steisel. The subject title for his May 12, 1994, memo to Giuliani was “Mayor’s office of Emergency Management.” He said he’d reviewed the city’s current police-run office and surveyed emergency operations in other cities, noting pointedly that in Los Angeles, Giuliani ally and Republican mayor Richard Riordan was “directly involved in the coordination and delivery of emergency response services in every major incident, something not done in prior mayoral administrations.” Powers analyzed the pros and cons of keeping OEM under police supervision, contending that the Police Department operates “most effectively at enforcement-related incidents and tends to be less effective at non-enforcement related incidents.” Comparing the status quo with the “transfer of emergency operations to the mayor’s office,” he zeroed in on the obvious advantage, noting that the new director and office would “have your authority at emergency incidents.”
Donna Lynne, the director of the mayor’s operations office, responded to Powers’s proposed transfer in a detailed August 26 memo of opposition. The subject of terrorism never came up at either end of this 10-page exchange. It just wasn’t part of the debate. Instead, the dispute focused on emergencies that were not terrorist acts, namely “non-enforcement events,” such as storms or water main breaks. One reason Lynne was asked to comment was that her unit played a key role in such events. Powers’s clear rationale for creating OEM was to improve the handling of these incidents. He faulted the Police Department for “making decisions” outside its expertise “without consulting other more experienced or informed agencies,” specifying the Fire Department and the press office.
Allied with Anemone, who was by then the highest-ranking uniformed official in the Police Department, Lynne resisted the change, but she believed that Powers and Giuliani had already made up their minds. “By August, the decision was made that everything was going to move from the police to under the mayor,” recalled Bill Motherway, who was the mayor’s liaison to the police emergency management office under Dinkins and Giuliani.
Finally, in December 1994, a firebombing near City Hall closed the question. An unemployed computer programmer carried the bomb onto a train in an extortion plot against the Transit Authority. It exploded prematurely, scalding the bomber and injuring 49 people. Giuliani celebrated the city’s multifaceted response at a press conference in the immediate aftermath. A subway cop saw the charred bomber arrive at a Brooklyn station and held him on suspicion. Another cop on the train rescued many people. An Emergency Medical Services technician rushed to the scene and helped “a stream of victims staggering from the smoky subway to daylight above,” the News reported. The Fire Department was immediately at the scene and effective. “The end result,” Giuliani bragged, “is that an incident that could have been very, very destabilizing turns into one that helps to stabilize the city and helps to convince people that the city can respond effectively.”
But Jerry Hauer, who ultimately became the new office of Emergency Management’s first director, says Giuliani and Powers told him later that the mayor was privately seething. “He talked to guys from the fire department, the police department and EMS and couldn’t get a patient count” that he needed for his press conference, said Hauer. Steven Kuhr, the Emergency Medical Services official who would become Hauer’s top deputy, said that separate command posts were stretched down Broadway and that the mayor could see that “nobody was talking to each other,” even about something as basic as injuries.
“Giuliani felt that it was critical for a mayor to ensure that emergencies were well run,” Hauer said in his private testimony to the 9/11 Commission.2 “There were two incidents that led him to create OEM. First, there was the firebombing in the subway. The mayor was unable to get the full story on the event and felt that coordination between the emergency medical service, fire and police was disjointed. The second event was a water main break in Brooklyn. It was a huge street collapse and the mayor heard about it on TV. No one called him. That’s what led the mayor to set up OEM.” Later, deposed in a civil suit involving the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, Hauer listed the same events, emphasizing the defective patient information. “He wanted good information. He wanted fast information. And he wanted an agency that reported to him,” Hauer testified.
Donna Lynne, who had overseen the Emergency Response Team, was happy to give up all of her office’s emergency responsibilities, which sometimes had her rushing out to beaches to watch waves and ordering sandbags in anticipation of a hurricane. In fact, it was hurricanes, snowstorms, and water mains that absolutely, in her view, led to OEM. She couldn’t recall terrorism ever even coming up in the City Hall discussions that led to the creation of the new agency.
In January 1995, a brief design for the new agency was completed, and quietly, in February, the budget office approved $200,000 to fund it. The search for an executive director began, but it dragged on, unsuccessfully, for months beyond the deadline. One applicant, Jonathan Best, who as director of emergency management in Bridgeport, Connecticut, handled the collapse of two 13-story buildings, recalled the selection process as “light” and unfocused. A former Emergency Medical Services supervisor in New York, Best said the job posting in the Times was “a little tiny, blind ad that didn’t even say City of New York on it. It just had a P.O. Box number. It was almost as if it were a secret that they were hiring somebody.”
Twelve city officials attended his interview, including the Fire Department’s special operations chief Ray Downey and a police captain, and everyone was making jokes. “They didn’t know what they were looking for,” says Best. “They didn’t know what an emergency manager really was.” Was the subject of terrorism raised? “Terrorism was not mentioned. I was pretty surprised at that.” What about the ’93 bombing? “I don’t believe it ever came up.” Was he ready to discuss terrorism? “I prepared absolutely. I went over in my mind how I would respond to certain questions.” But nothing like that surfaced. They gave him one scenario and asked how he would respond; it was, predictably, a hurricane. “The police guy joked that I had outlined their exact plan. That’s when I thought I had done well.”
Hauer didn’t respond to the blind ad. A former deputy director of Emergency Medical Services in New York, he had gone on to become the director of emergency management for Indiana. He knew Downey from his New York days, and when they met at a search and rescue event, they got talking about the OEM job. By then, the search was stymied. Hauer was a heavyweight in the field, and Downey told him, “Get me your resume.” Downey kept calling him, and Hauer wanted to come to town to see his mother anyway, so he agreed to an interview. It turned out to be the first of five, a prelude to the one with Giuliani. The only time he remembers the subject of terrorism coming up throughout the marathon was when the city executives discussed a sarin gas drill it had done shortly after a deadly, cult-orchestrated attack in the Tokyo subways in the spring of 1995. “They just did the drill. It turned out badly,” Hauer remembered.
He eventually graduated to a City Hall session with Denny Young and other brass. They asked him to stay over and meet with Powers at seven o’clock the next morning. In a three-cigarette walk around Hauer’s hotel, Powers probed his planning background and thinking. “He talked about the problems between police and fire,” citing examples but not any related to the ’93 bombing. Hauer even met with Giuliani’s wife, Donna Hanover, who early on played a pivotal role in key decisions. Then he went back to Indiana and, a couple of weeks later, was asked to return to meet with Giuliani. “I was very impressed. We had good chemistry. He wanted an independent OEM that worked for him and did strategic planning and interagency coordination.”
But when Hauer was offered the job, he initially turned it down. “The pay and status was at a deputy commissioner level,” he said. “I told them the office would fail if the director was in a lower-level position, not on a par with the police and fire commissioners. He had to be a peer at the same salary and with direct access to the mayor. They had to come around to my way of thinking about it. They soon said okay and I was hired at the same salary and as a member of the cabinet.”
When Hauer’s appointment was announced in January 1996, he, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Fire Commissioner Howard Safir, and Giuliani posed for pictures in the mayor’s office, and he went over to the police and fire departments for separate meetings with the commissioners and their top aides. The mayor actually cited the Tokyo attack as a reason to improve the city’s preparation for increasingly difficult disasters, though Hauer said he didn’t recall Giuliani ever mentioning the World Trade Center bombing to him before or after his hiring.
Hauer started in February, precisely a year after the hunt for a director started. He had already managed to redefine the job. While Giuliani told him in the interview that he wanted better coordination between the uniformed services, Hauer said, “I wouldn’t say calming the police-fire rivalry was a high priority.” Hauer raised that issue to a new level with his status and salary demands; the office acquired a potential authority not previously considered. He understood, even if City Hall didn’t, that coordination was more than a bromide, and that doing it would take teeth.
City Hall had not given him any particular outline of how OEM was supposed to be organized. So Hauer began drafting his own plan, as well as the mayor’s executive order, which empowered OEM to coordinate the city’s response to all incidents requiring a multiagency response and listed a dozen categories, starting with “severe weather” and ending with “acts of terrorism.” The executive order also put OEM squarely in command of the Police Department’s emergency center, spelling out that Hauer would decide when it was used and “have primary responsibility for its operation” during an emergency. It was the first time an outside agency was, ever granted control over an operation inside police headquarters. Hauer’s office, however, hardly had resources commensurate with its potential authority. To keep the head count down in the mayor’s office, he was told he could only hire staff on the payroll of other agencies. “They didn’t want to create a whole new agency,” he recalls, disturbed that “no other agency was run like that.”
Hauer’s hand was strengthened, however, by a resurgence of attention to the debacle of the city’s sarin gas drill. Just days before the official launch of his agency, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released excerpts from the city’s confidential 1995 sarin drill after-action report at a well-covered Washington hearing. It found that the subway drill resulted in the theoretical deaths of most of the first hundred responders, who rushed in “totally unprepared.” In an echo of the ’93 bombing analysis by Fusco and others, the report also called radio communications “abysmal,” concluding that inter-agency communications were impossible, since the agencies “operated on different frequencies.” The Police Department’s frozen zone and command post at the drill were configured for bombs, not gas, which meant that most of the personnel and vehicles there were “in the path of escaping gas.” Only the Fire Department’s Hazardous Material Unit performed capably, the report concluded.
Hauer said Giuliani had only “mentioned the drill in passing” during their initial talks, and, since it occurred three months after Giuliani decided to establish OEM, he knew it had nothing to do with OEM’s creation. But Hauer had a strong background in bio/chem and the well-publicized release of the sarin gas report gave him leverage to push for new protocols and to put pressure on the police to accept them.
Indeed, putting pressure on the Police Department had long been part of the unacknowledged politics of the campaign that led to the creation of OEM. Hauer was quite willing years later to say that the Fire Department was a big factor pushing for OEM: “Safir was trying to screw Bratton and the police department.” Asked in a civil suit what “the scope” of the new position he was offered was, Hauer testified: “to develop an agency that the mayor was pulling out of the Police Department and evolve it into a real emergency management agency.”
Safir equated a Police Department deduction with a Fire Department addition. He vowed at his first public meeting with the firefighters union to retake control of emergencies from the police, a promise that brought cheers from the only major union to endorse Giuliani. Motherway says he participated in meeting with Safir as early as March 1994 “about transferring emergency management from the police department to the mayor’s office.” Richie Sheirer, who was promoted to deputy fire commissioner by Safir, claims that he convinced Safir to push Giuliani for “a more level playing field, with emergency management in the mayor’s office.” Safir “brought that to Mayor Giuliani,” said Sheirer, and Giuliani “looked it over” and created OEM.
Giuliani and Safir were already on the same page—both wanted to reposition the Fire Department as the city’s prime rescue agency. With the dramatic decline in fires nationally and locally, a 12,000-person FDNY was unsustainable, especially in budget-slashing times, unless Giuliani could come up with something else for it to do. So the mayor decided early in his administration to take Emergency Medical Services away from the Health and Hospitals Corporation and deliver it to the firefighters. Giuliani also leaned toward moving more emergencies under Fire Department control, and that would become Hauer’s approach at OEM, especially on hazardous materials, or hazmat, incidents.
Safir’s push, however, was all about turf. It was not a serious policy assessment, based on the recommendations from the ’93 bombing experience. In fact, Safir appeared barely aware of them. Anthony Fusco stayed on as chief of the department for Safir’s first six months, but the new commissioner never discussed the bombing with him. “Safir and I had a few discussions, but I can’t recall him ever involving me in anything like that,” he said later. “I guess there were ongoing projects at the time, but I can’t recall him sitting down and discussing the World Trade Center, no.” Safir never talked to him about OEM or terrorism, either.
Safir was not unaware of what Fusco had written, however. Unbeknownst to the retiring firefighter, Safir did allude to the Fusco reports in a letter to Peter Powers in February 1994. “Many findings” from the 1993 “post-operational review have caused us to rethink certain facets of our operations,” he wrote. But Safir wasn’t referring to the defend-in-place strategy, or the radios, or any of the major issues Fusco had raised. His only concern was that the department had to use reserve vehicles to fight the 1993 fire and that the reserves “lacked air packs, masks and other essential items.” He wanted $300,000 to stock “the reserve apparatus.”
While Donna Lynne thought the water main and other nonenforcement emergencies were the driving force that led to OEM, others theorized that Safir was. “He had a much better relationship with Rudy than we did,” said Lou Anemone, the uniformed embodiment of the Police Department. “Safir would gin Rudy up. He wanted OEM as a way to get around us. OEM would put the fire department in a better position to control some emergency scenes.”
When the police ran OEM, the fire chiefs and other top officials would have to make their way to the eighth floor of 1 Police Plaza during emergencies, a trek Anemone was sure the Fire Department brass “hated.” Giuliani apparently didn’t like it much, either. Bratton’s top aide, John Miller, the former NBC and ABC reporter who’s now the principal spokesman for the FBI, painted the picture: “OEM was a little room off to the side of the operations section, but big events came to life there, like snowstorms and blizzards. The mayor sought to take that over.” After the first big snowstorm of his administration, Miller said, Giuliani “chafed” at having to “trot over to our office where the cameras were. It drove him nuts. The police commissioner was in charge in a crisis; why was the mayor subservient to the police department? So he hired Jerry Hauer and created a mayor’s office of emergency management, and that way, the next time there’s a snowstorm, the fire department and the police department were subservient to him.”
Bratton put it more diplomatically: “The mayor recognized early on he could better coordinate between agencies if control rested with him. So there was a perceived need, based on watching agencies battle each other. And it also fit into his well-known penchant for absolute control.”
Hauer thinks Miller and Bratton are overstating what he sees as just one element driving the campaign for OEM. “Electeds always want to be shown as in charge. There were a lot of rationales for OEM and the visibility of the mayor might have been one. I don’t think you can look at it as just an in-charge issue. I’d rank that lower than others. It might have been a subtext.” Actually, Hauer’s agenda for his briefing with the mayor on March 19, 1996, the day the executive order was signed, lists “the visibility of the mayor’s office/the mayor” as one of the three functions of the new office. Deputy Mayor Fran Reiter, who was close enough to watch these machinations but was not a prime actor on police/fire issues, said, “I can’t tell you whether terror was part of the equation. It was more a question of who’s in charge. The historical struggle between police and fire was on the mayor’s mind. He loved cops, but he did not have a utopian view of how they functioned. They were in control of their thing, the city’s response to emergencies. He put in place a structure that would be immune to internecine warfare. That’s where OEM came from—civilian control over response. I can’t say any of it came from a recognition of terrorism.”
It was a water main break. Conflicting patient counts from a madman’s firebombing. Blizzards and the threat of hurricanes. A need to know first. Safir’s turf-war whispers. A grand stage. A good-government attempt at stronger coordination. Realism about police efficiency. OEM was a mix of all of these intertwined motives—temper tantrums, reform, friendship, union allies, ego, and control. The one thing it was not was a prophetic vision, as Giuliani and others have portrayed it. Terrorism was as far down on the list of motives as it was on the list of anticipated incidents in the executive order. The ’93 bombing came in behind a foot of snow. Instead of foresight about an apocalypse, OEM was an example of hindsight about a 30-foot water pipe.
THE POLICE DEPARTMENT was the strongest public bureaucracy in New York, a city unto itself. It reacted to any perceived challenge to its power as fiercely as it reacted to a 10-13, the radio call when an officer is in distress. To Jerry Hauer, who was trying to make the NYPD a team player in an arena it had long controlled, steely resistance to a unified emergency plan was no surprise. What was unexpected was that Rudy Giuliani let the department undercut Hauer’s supposed mandate to reorganize the city’s response preparations time and time again.
They could get away with just about anything. Detectives tailed him secretly. The intelligence division wouldn’t give him any information, although he had the highest security clearance of anyone in the administration. Even after his office was officially put in charge of the command center at police headquarters, the department refused to tell him if its backup generators worked. It disapproved 16-hour tours for the drivers that drove him and key staff to emergencies, routinely told OEM’s 24-hour Watch Command to call 9-1-1 about emergencies, just like any citizen. It boycotted a hazmat/terror drill and delayed the assignment of selected police staff to OEM. As late as the eve of the high-alert millennium, the grand debut of Giuliani’s command center, the Police Department was still defying City Hall orders and preparing to run its own operation out of the supposedly mothballed emergency center at 1 Police Plaza.
If the good-government purpose of OEM was to get police and fire on the same emergency response page, Hauer, instead, wound up with a book-length manuscript of contentious memos and dueling drafts of response plans. But what wore him down, and finally forced him to leave, wasn’t so much the infighting. It was the waffling at City Hall, the “lack of support” he got. He was so well-regarded that he wound up with the top bio/chem job in the Bush administration, so his departure in 2000 was a noticeable loss when catastrophe struck a year later.
When Hauer’s appointment was announced in January 1996, he sat down with Commissioner Bratton, anticipating combat. But Bratton was laser-focused on street crime and unthreatened by a new emergency office. In his own book, Turnaround, which is principally a postmortem on his New York years, Bratton doesn’t mention his own or Hauer’s emergency management offices, nor does he refer to terrorism, the ’93 bombing, hurricane threats, water mains, or any other crisis response question. They were not high on the agenda, Miller acknowledges. Bratton and Hauer connected instantly, and as it turned out, all they had was an instant to connect. “Bratton couldn’t have been more gracious. I got no resistance from Bratton,” Hauer recalls.
As successful as Bratton had been, he was already on Giuliani’s hit list when Hauer arrived. The trouble started with a Time magazine cover story, also in January, picturing Bratton in a trench coat by a squad car and making him the poster boy for crime reduction. By March 1996, as Hauer was settling in at his operations office, the Giuliani team was anonymously carving Bratton up in the press, planting stories about his personnel moves, six-figure book deal, nightlife, and junkets. On March 26, Bratton quit, later acknowledging that he was driven from office.
Two days after Bratton resigned, Howard Safir was named commissioner. Safir had law enforcement credentials as a drug enforcement agent and an associate director of the U.S. Marshals Service, but all of it was collateral experience compared with the background of a career urban cop like Bratton, who understood policing in his gut. Giuliani, who had his corporation counsel probing the propriety of Bratton’s recent book deal, was strangely undisturbed by the fact that Safir had unsuccessfully marketed his own book for years and been successfully sued by a ghostwriter he had hired. In the days when memoirs were supposed to bear some resemblance to truth, Safir advertised himself as a marine, though his entire active-duty career consisted of two, six-week, platoon leadership sessions at Quantico. He dropped out in the middle of the second session, just as he’d flunked out of law school. His claimed role in the capture of an Asian drug lord was also mostly farce, but his dozen rejection letters from publishing houses were quite real. (“I thought about all the events I had participated in and realized that there were few major crimes, disasters or government conspiracies that I has [sic] not had some contact with,” Safir declared in the book proposal.)
Safir’s prime initiative as fire commissioner had been his effort to shut down the street alarm box system, and his campaign to sell the plan was as big a loser as the one for his book. He rallied support for the alarm box initiative by telling a reporter: “Will there ever come a time when a person won’t be able to get to a phone and report an emergency and result in a death? The answer is yes.” When it came to the ability to spin a quote or charm a reporter, Safir was Bratton’s mirror opposite. He once told his federal staff before a visit by senate investigators, “If any of you have dirty laundry, you’d better keep it to yourself,” and the quote wound up in a newspaper. It was Newsday columnist Ellis Henican, however, who put his finger on Safir’s greatest selling point at City Hall: “Say what you will about Howard Safir, but Rudolph Giuliani will never again experience the indignity of being overshadowed by a police commissioner more charismatic than he.” Safir’s six-foot-three frame, steel gray hair, stone face, and aura of authority was perfect for his on-camera role, which was to stand solemnly next to the mayor when crime dominated the news.
What few admirers or detractors knew about Safir was how adeptly, despite his size 14 shoes, he could pirouette. Jerry Hauer was about to find out. Though Safir and sidekick Sheirer, who came with the new commissioner to the Police Department, had helped invent OEM as a vehicle for Fire Department ascendancy, they switched sides as soon as they switched headquarters.
Safir was sworn in on April 15 in the most elaborate ceremony on the steps of City Hall for any appointee in history. By July 2, the agenda for Hauer’s monthly meeting with the mayor celebrated OEM’s early successes but then listed a few issues: “Success has its price. Not getting the support from Howard. They cannot micro-manage us. We get little information in areas we have asked for and agreed we should get. They refuse to allow us to get involved. Howard has simply not given us the backing.” Steering OEM already in the direction of bio/ chem planning, Hauer specifically cited “terrorist threat” information as one of his frustrations.
By September 25, 1996, Hauer’s notes indicated that Safir was criticizing OEM for “trying to get to the media” with emergency information rather than “the mayor first.” Hauer’s response to Safir’s critique concluded: “Howard’s veiled threat about stonewalling us is what we see happening now.” The notes also included the astonishing revelation that six months after Safir became police commissioner, “Howard asked me who in the Police Department he could talk with on terrorism.”3
In January 1997, Sheirer, a new top deputy in the Police Department, took the budding war to another level. Sheirer became Safir’s point man in leading the opposition to Hauer’s first major directive, a draft plan for how to coordinate a hazardous materials or chemical event. Hauer’s plan made the Fire Department the incident commander. That was precisely what Safir had called for when he ran the Fire Department, but ensconced now at 1 Police Plaza, the new police commissioner discovered all kinds of hazards in the idea. Attack-dog Sheirer said in a letter that the plan missed “the mark in terms of understanding of the NYPD as an organization, its culture, and its expertise.” An attachment to the Sheirer letter called the plan “an attempt to pick the pockets of the Police Department,” by excluding it from chemical identification, medical triage, decontamination, “and informing the press.” Under no circumstances, the review concluded, “should the Police Department relinquish authority or responsibility to maintain public order to any other city agency.”
Sheirer also took some shots at the department he’d worked at for the previous two and a half decades. Objecting to the requirement that the police and other agencies consult with the Fire Department on protective gear at the scene, the Sheirer attachment said: “This assumes the FD member responding has the necessary expertise, which may not be the case.” The same language was used about evacuation. “Does the Fire Department have the necessary expertise to determine the evacuation areas?” His memo also challenged the guideline that permitted the Fire Department to decide when an incident reached “a solely investigation stage” and, thus, became police business. It warned that giving the Fire Department such authority “will not only create animosity, but will lead to the infamous ‘battle of the badges.’”
The bottom line was that Sheirer’s package of assessments branded the plan “potentially dangerous to citizens of our city who might be hazardous material victims,” calling it “fool hearty [sic] and unacceptable.” It also trashed OEM, even recommending the elimination of the term “On Scene Coordinator” that OEM had given itself, and charging that the plan “does not reflect any input given by the PD during this planning process.” Sheirer continued pummeling the plan with a March memo, and the Police Department then produced its own 29-page draft. The police charged that all Hauer was doing was “following what’s generally done throughout the country”—a strange argument—and one that Hauer answered by saying there wasn’t another city in America where police run hazmat events.
The battle never abated. As late as December 3, 1998, the Police Department formally informed Hauer that it would not participate in a hazmat drill scheduled for December 7 because participating “would result in our condoning this dangerous, misguided and improper intrusion” into a matter that belonged under police jurisdiction. Safir was out to kill OEM—the best idea he’d ever brought to the Giuliani administration. In his proprietary mind, every addition for the Fire Department was now a subtraction from police power.
The Police Department waged the same guerrilla warfare against Hauer’s second most important initiative, a 1998 plan for biological incidents that also put the Fire Department in charge. This time Anemone led the paper trail of opposition, making the same “crime scene” presumption that the police offered on the chemical plan. The detailed critique contended that the first agency to respond should contact the Police Department’s 9-1-1, not OEM, and repeatedly attacked any “operational role” OEM planned to assume. The police argued that the incident commander “in a terrorist incident” of any type, including the anthrax example that was part of Hauer’s protocol, “is either the FBI under federal law or, since terrorism is a crime, the Police Department.” That argument was the department’s rationale for going it alone whenever terrorism was suspected.
Echoing the ’93 bombing tug-of-war over World Trade Center bodies, the Police Department was particularly upset that the Fire Department got special coffins “known as containment vessels.” Handwritten notes in the police assessment of the Hauer plan complained: “PD never got its coffins,” and, then, simply “circumvent the protocol.” In Hauer’s efforts to try to satisfy competing interests, the protocol called for teams of two Fire Department Hazmat, two police Emergency Services, and two Department of Health personnel to simultaneously enter the room where a biologic agent was believed present. The Police Department was offended that it was a firefighter who was selected, as the police memo put it, “to peek into the room and take digital pictures” before entry.
The war even infected the planning for the millennium, which was widely seen by city and federal officials as a moment of maximum terrorist threat. On June 26, 1999, just as Hauer and Giuliani’s long-awaited command center at 7 WTC was coming on line, the Police Department sent out letters to a wide variety of agencies and groups announcing that its own emergency center would be open for business December 29 through January 3, 2000. It was a direct, defiant challenge to Hauer and, indirectly, Giuliani. When City Hall got wind of the Safir end run, Joe Lhota, the mayor’s first deputy, issued an unmistakable October 14 order aimed directly at Safir but addressed to all agency heads. “In an effort to consolidate the response” to millennium disruptions, OEM’s command center “will be the single, central Emergency Operations Center.” Incredibly, five days later, Ray Powers, deputy chief of the Police Department’s operations division, sent a follow-up letter to those who got the June one, complaining that the police had yet to receive a reply to their request that organizations “provide a representative for our command and control center.” Even after a terrorist conspiracy targeting New York was uncovered by the FBI days before the millennium, the department went ahead with its own command center operation, fragmenting the response that night.
Hauer announced his resignation shortly before the millennium and left soon after, dismayed at how few of his detailed response plans had actually been put in place. “Every agency involved in the hazmat/ chemical and biological plans had to sign off on the protocols,” he said, “but Safir never did.” Instead, Hauer got “page after page of critical notes” from Sheirer, along with word that “the police commissioner didn’t agree with the protocols and that they were not going to adhere to them.”
Anemone, who felt OEM was simply “giving more to the Fire Department than should be,” agreed that the police should fight the rules for responding to biological or chemical emergencies. And he remembered that “the mayor never came down on one side or the other. I don’t think he ever made a decision that the police department would be in charge or the fire department. Safir wouldn’t sign off, he was dealing with Denny Young and Rudy and telling them the Police Department had issues, and Rudy didn’t make him sign. Jerry came back to us with more plans and we said ‘Jerry, you’ve got to deal with the issues.’ For such a decisive guy, Rudy did nothing.” That meant that no approved rules for these kinds of incidents were in place, even at the millennium, a moment of maximum threat.
Phil McArdle, a member of a Fire Department hazmat unit and a particularly aggressive leader of the firefighters union, wrote a letter in October 1997 about the police acting “in direct contradiction” of hazmat protocols. “Nobody in the City of New York can control these individuals,” he charged. “No matter what documents are written, by the mayor, by the office of Emergency Management; the Police will selectively choose what they will comply with. Is this not anarchy?” McArdle wasn’t referring to the unsigned regulations; he was more frustrated by police stonewalling of what he called “a mayoral directive sent to all agencies.”
Hauer wrote, and Giuliani theoretically sanctioned, the directive that obsessed McArdle. Developed in early 1997, the four-page document called “Direction and Control of Emergencies” contained an organizational chart, or matrix, that listed which department was in charge of every anticipated multiagency response. The Fire Department had hazardous materials, nuclear, radioactive release, and chemical crises. Biological was undetermined, with the caveat that OEM would “task agencies based on the type of event.” (That language preceded the 1998 bio plan, which put the Fire Department in charge.) The introduction to the matrix called it “preliminary” and said the assignments were “suggested for the purpose of fostering a dialogue among the PD, FD and OEM.” The designations were “intended to present questions” to be resolved in joint planning. At the same time, the Hauer-prepared document invoked the executive order’s powers and said it directed “OEM to define and ensure participation of all agencies” with emergency roles. The assignments were described as a result of that mayoral mandate.
Hauer framed the matrix and put it up on his office wall. He acted as if it had the force of law. After the Police Department refused to sign the protocols, it became all Hauer had. At first, the department contended that it had no idea what Hauer was talking about, explicitly stating it had never so much as seen a copy. Then, in a September 19, 1997, letter, Anemone acknowledged that the department had at last seen this tentative assignment list. Without conceding anything, Anemone said simply, “According to OEM, this matrix is now city policy.”
Ray Kelly, who got into his own battles in the Bloomberg era and won control over hazmat incidents, researched the history of the issue carefully. “The order came up and isn’t signed by Giuliani,” Kelly insists. “No one can tell you when it was issued; it’s undated. The mayor was ambiguous about issuing the order.” Hauer insists that he still has his signed and framed copy, but concedes that the mayor’s lack of support for the protocols that implemented the matrix cast such a cloud over it that no one took it seriously.
Perhaps the best evidence of the ambiguous authority of Hauer’s organizational chart is that Giuliani was forced, four years later, to issue one in July 2001 with precisely the same title. By then, Richie Sheirer was in charge at OEM, a fox-in-the-chicken-coop promotion that stunned and deflated Hauer. This second matrix was definitely signed by Rudy Giuliani and was in effect on 9/11. Instead of resolving the disputed questions of terrorist chemical, biological, or nuclear events, it passed the buck, saying: “NYPD or FDNY.” In a footnote, the two-page directive said: “The nature of this type of event is such that the Incident Commander will shift as the event evolves.” It laid out three possible transfers of authority at the same terrorist event—from police to fire and back to police, with OEM resolving conflicts. The Fire Department did get control of hazmat incidents that were not terrorist events, though how anyone would determine which ones were acts of terror and which ones weren’t at the outset of any event was a mystery.
If this was supposed to be the definitive Giuliani command and control order, it proved, after nearly eight years in office, that the mayor had neither command nor control. By then, Bernard Kerik and Tom Von Essen were running police and fire. Faced with a choice between uniforms, with his friends at the helms of competing empires and Sheirer a blank slate, all Giuliani could produce was mush. The 9/11 Commission’s John Farmer said Giuliani “wouldn’t have had to issue the 2001 order if command and control was already in place,” confirming how uncertain the 1997 assignment of responsibility was. “There was an effort to improve communication and the relationship between the departments,” said Farmer. “But I don’t think they made inroads.”
The Police Department wasn’t satisfied to merely frustrate Hauer; soon it targeted him. “I had to make my own contacts at the CIA and FBI,” he said, “because I was not getting the threat information the Police Department was getting. The intelligence division was told not to talk to OEM.” While the police wouldn’t give Hauer any information, they were quite eager to get some on him. In 1998, prior to the hazmat drill the police boycotted, police detectives tailed Hauer to a Fire Department prep session at Randall’s Island in upper Manhattan. “They took pictures of me working with the fire department. Howard brought the pictures to a joint meeting with the mayor,” recalled Hauer. “Howard said I was giving an unfair advantage to the fire department by helping them prepare for this drill. The photos had me standing with the fire chiefs. I told the mayor I would help any agency. I was tailed like a common criminal and they put it in front of the mayor. My driver told me I was often tailed.” Hauer saw the confrontation as a test of Giuliani’s support: “I was pretty disappointed. He just looked at me. I thought he would have been more outraged at having a commissioner followed.”
Hauer recalled a similar second session, this time in 1999, shortly before the millennium. Hauer, Safir, and Von Essen were meeting with Giuliani, and Hauer told the mayor that the Fire Department was excluded from Police Department millennium security briefings. “Rudy looked at Safir and asked how much the fire department was involved. Howard said he got them involved in the planning. I said: ‘Don’t lie to the mayor.’ Howard was shaking. I said: ‘Tommy, answer him.’ And Von Essen said: ‘Well, we really haven’t been involved.’”
It baffled Hauer how Safir could get away with so much. The police commissioner had become a public scandal, all the invisible emergency control issues aside. The press revealed that he had assigned two dozen cops to work at the new Police Museum, where his wife was board chair. He had used on-duty detectives to chauffeur his daughter’s wedding guests. When his wife was involved in a fender bender, he’d filed suit, demanding $250,000 for loss of sex. The police union took an unprecedented vote of no confidence in him. When unarmed Amadou Diallo was killed in a 41-shot police attack and protests filled 1 Police Plaza, the commissioner skipped a City Council hearing on it because of “a scheduling conflict,” only to be caught on camera standing next to Helen Hunt at the Oscars. Even Giuliani’s ethics board wound up slapping him on the wrist for taking a $7,000 “freebie” to Hollywood, after it was revealed his benefactor did minor business with the Police Department and after Safir finally ponied up for the junket.
Hauer was long gone by the time Safir resigned in August 2000, hit by prostate cancer at the same time as Giuliani. On his last day in office, Giuliani called his friend of 25 years “the greatest commissioner in the history of the city.” Safir was as modest, telling a large audience at a police promotion ceremony that his administration was “the most successful in the history of the NYPD.” Giuliani immediately installed an even closer and more subservient friend than Safir, Bernie Kerik.
But the mayor’s protracted unwillingness to stand up to Safir or the department, even in service of emergency response goals he publicly proclaimed, has remained a secret to this day. Jerry Hauer’s sworn testimony about Giuliani’s spinelessness in a civil suit years later left a roomful of lawyers, on both sides of a case involving the collapse of 7 WTC, in utter disbelief. The lawyer for Con Ed, whose substation was destroyed in the collapse, asked Hauer whether the operations center at 1 Police Plaza, which Hauer oversaw from 1996 to 1999, had a backup emergency generator that worked:
HAUER: I don’t know if it was functioning.
QUESTION: You were the head of OEM?
HAUER: Yes. The police would not give us a straight answer. They told us it was working. They never tested it on load. The Police Department barely allowed us in that command center. We got nothing but resistance from the Police Department.
QUESTION: Am I correct, sir, that you as director of OEM never satisfied yourself as to whether or not there was an operative emergency generating system to protect the command center?
HAUER: The Police Department would never give us a correct answer.
QUESTION: Did you ever go to your friend Rudy Giuliani and ask him to get an answer for you?
HAUER: I did.
QUESTION: Did he?
HAUER: No.
QUESTION: Why not?
HAUER: The Police Department was resistant—
QUESTION: Wouldn’t give him an answer either?
HAUER: We never got a straight answer—
QUESTION: Are you telling me, sir, that you, as director of OEM, went to the Mayor of the City of New York and asked him to find out whether there was an operative emergency generating system for the command center of OEM, and he was unable to do so? Is that your testimony?
Hauer: I am telling you that I told the mayor that we could not determine whether the generator at 1 Police Plaza was functional.
QUESTION: If you thought an emergency generating system was critical to the functioning of OEM, why didn’t you do something to find out whether you had one, no matter what that took?
HAUER: Because we were battling to try and survive, because the Police Department fought us right and left. They did not want OEM to survive. They undermined us every step of the way.
It was a side of tough-guy Rudy few in New York knew. Cowed by a department that worked for him, a rollover. He would not take the Police Department on, especially after he drove Bratton out. Under Safir and Kerik, it was really his department. It surrounded him with the largest detail in history; he lived inside its cocoon. He called police headquarters early every morning and got the crime numbers that were making him a national hero; the overnight tallies were usually better than breakfast. He could still see four of his uncles in their uniforms. His federal law enforcement career made him, in his own mind, a cop in a suit himself. It was respect, fear, usefulness, comfort, family, identity. It was all too much to expect him to stand up against them for emergency abstractions that might never happen.
ANTHONY FUSCO WORKED for Rudy Giuliani for six months. As chief of the department, he and Giuliani conferred at major fires. They talked in March 1994 at a blaze in the village that took the lives of three firefighters, suddenly incinerating them as they stood on the second floor of a three-story walk-up apartment building. The captain of that unit, John Drennan, burned over 50 percent of his body, hung on in the hospital for 40 days before dying, and the mayor and Fusco visited him often, interacting again. They met at a three-alarm fire in Harlem. “As soon as I had the opportunity to get away from the command post,” Fusco recalled, “I would brief him. He was a very intense manager. He had his hands in everything. He wanted to be briefed. Most of the interaction was between him and the commissioner, but if there was a press conference and there was a briefing that was fire-related, those were the times I would interact with him.”
But they never discussed the ’93 bombing nor the hundreds of pages of reforms proposed by Fusco and his colleagues. “I don’t think that issue—of what we should do with things like that—ever surfaced in any kind of true discussions,” said Fusco years later. It didn’t come up with Giuliani, Safir, or anyone at City Hall. No one talked to him about terrorism, OEM, helicopter training, radios, defend-in-place fire strategies, joint command posts, the WTC, fire codes at Port Authority facilities, elevator protocols, the disabled, fifth alarms, heavyweight fire gear, or any of the other meaty issues raised in his after-action reports.
“I don’t think anything really changed,” says Fusco, focusing particularly on his recommendation that a ranking Police Department representative remain at a fire incident command post, just one measure of the unified command failings of the Giuliani years. “Once I left the department, I’m out of it. You had a lot of initiatives, but whether they carried that out after you left, that’s questionable.”
There was no better example of City Hall laxity over these years than on the question of helicopter rescues, the controversy that almost led to blows between badges in 1993. Those rescues had so convinced Ray Kelly of the usefulness of this tactic that afterward he sent police helicopters around the city to photograph skyscraper roofs in preparation for possible rescues. But Giuliani issued a protocol in 1994 that said only firefighters could do rescues at a fire. Bratton was commissioner, and the decision provoked no noticeable ire within the new administration. It went a step beyond Fusco’s proposed joint exercises, which he pushed as a way of getting fire and police rescuers used to working together. Under Giuliani’s order, police pilots were supposed to go to designated Manhattan heliports and wait for firefighters to meet them there. Instead of the skilled Emergency Service Unit that rappelled onto the North Tower by rope in 1993 and chopped down the antennas obstructing the helipad, firefighters were to be placed on the roofs.
Greg Semendinger, a police pilot who did rescues in ’93 and returned on 9/11, called the protocols “silly.” There was no reason, he maintained, “why a helicopter that can take people off a roof would be sent to the opposite side of the city just to get firemen. When you’re in a helicopter, time is of the essence, and we should respond to the scene immediately, and try to do whatever we can.” There were supposed to be joint training runs, as Fusco had urged, but all they did, says Semendinger, was “a lot of orientation flights.” Pilots flew to the West Side, picked up a Manhattan fire company, and took them for a ride. There were no landings and drills. Firefighters weren’t taught how to rappel onto roofs, as emergency service cops had done in 1993. Semendinger, whose father was a firefighter, said the FDNY was “always angry” that they didn’t have their own copters and “they didn’t like the idea that they had to call us to do a rescue.” That’s why “they didn’t request” helicopter help in ’93, says Semendinger, “and didn’t again in 2001.”
And Semendinger believes helicopters could have saved a few dozen people, using 250-foot hoists with folding seats, on 9/11. Hovering over the towers, Semendinger said the northwest corner of the North Tower was virtually smoke-free, and that rotating helicopter hoists could’ve gotten “a lot of people off” the roof. At another point, a roof rappel team was assembled and a helicopter was dispatched to pick them up. The main reason no rescues were attempted, however, was because “there was nobody on the roof,” Semendinger said. And the roof was empty because of a triple system of locked doors installed since 1993. One door could be opened only from a 22nd-floor Security Command Center, an “improvement” the Port Authority attributed to the ’93 bombing, though it actually made the rescues that occurred then impossible. The doors automatically unlocked when the power went off in 1993, but even when a decision was made to release them on 9/11, the software malfunctioned and the doors remained shut. The city building code required roof access and automatic unlocks in emergencies, but the authority was exempt from the code, and the Fire Department acquiesced to, if not urged, the roof shutdown.
The Port Authority’s Alan Reiss says that helicopter rescues “were considered and dismissed” during a review by the police and fire departments after 1993, and once the city decided they weren’t “practical,” the authority moved ahead with its lockout plan. Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen offered a similar history: “The fire department and the trade center were on board in not using the roof for a rescue. That was an agreed-upon policy. This is not something they wanted to do. And the doors were locked for a reason.” Asked if this “hard, formal policy” was a consequence of the 1993 rescues, Von Essen said, “It might well have been. The chiefs, in a sit-down with the Port Authority, come up with something; I would have just left it.” Neither the FDNY’s high-rise fire plan nor the Port Authority’s evacuation plan contained a single sentence about roof rescues. Semendinger also says the roof was even more cluttered with antennas in 2001 than it was in 1993, and that they also hampered landings. The Port Authority “was told” he says, to get them out of the way, but the Fire Department’s agreement to block the rescues contributed to the authority’s indifference about the antennas.
One top police commander barred landings on 9/11, and another ruled out rappeling shortly before the first tower collapsed, but hoists remained an option. The 9/11 Commission’s John Farmer concluded, “I’m sure the pilots want to believe that hoists could be done, but I doubt it.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology didn’t eliminate the possibility that hoists could have worked, but observed that “a very small fraction of the large number of people trapped above the impact zone could have been rescued.” The NYPD says that whether rescues could have been achieved is a “moot question,” refusing to take a position.
Buzzer locks that no longer automatically unlocked, Giuliani protocols shaped by turf tensions, Port Authority and Fire Department collusion, and profitable rooftop antenna rentals made rescues impossible before the first plane hit. The legitimate doubts about the feasibility of 9/11 rescues miss the point. Though Los Angeles has made helicopters a cornerstone of their emergency response, and though they helped here in 1993, NIST says they weren’t “intended to be an option” here, and that was a fixed policy choice long before 9/11. It was settled as soon as Rudy Giuliani took office and never reopened. Jerry Hauer, with his vague and unenforceable interagency powers, wouldn’t touch that hot potato. And since there was never an inter-agency high-rise fire drill or plan, no one ever tested the protocol Giuliani released seven years before 9/11.
As upset as Chief Fusco was in 1993, he tried to keep rooftop rescues, with training and joint participation, in the plans. In fact, the Fire Department circular Fusco helped draft said that helicopters might be “the only access available” in some fire circumstances, a valuable way to rescue “large numbers of people on the roof.” But, like so many of the other urgent lessons Fusco raised in 1993, a working roof rescue strategy never took shape.
FUSCO WAS ON a golf course at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina when the first plane hit on 9/11. Eleven other retired chiefs were with him at an annual outing. Almost all of them had children or other relatives in the department; Fusco had two nephews. The group went to the clubhouse and watched reruns of the attack and collapses and made a decision: “We gotta get back.”
Planes were grounded, so the chiefs came back in three rented mini-vans, four per van. By the time Fusco got home, his wife had a list of the 260 firefighters that Fusco knew who were missing. Fusco rushed down to fire headquarters the next day and tried to help set up “places where people could get information.” A fire captain drove him to the site. “I was not prepared for what it looked like,” Fusco said. “I was standing in the same spot where I stood when I commanded the ’93 job. And the huge buildings, and the hotel were just…I just couldn’t believe it. I was very depressed for a long time. I wound up with a hiatal hernia and I didn’t even realize it was from the aggravation. My doctor knew I had been the chief. He said, ‘Don’t you know what it’s from?’ I said no. ‘You’re burning acid every day because of the incident.’”
What was also eating away at him were the missed opportunities. “It’s everybody’s job to implement these changes,” he says now. “The recommendations come and people determine whether it’s truly necessary or not. If you feel it’s necessary, you still might not always go through with it. I know they ran into some of the same problems with the second incident that I had. The second incident proves again that everything that went wrong in the first incident went wrong in the second incident. I don’t think it got addressed properly.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology published an unnoticed appendix listing nine recommendations from ’93 and footnoting them simply as Fusco 1 through 9. In muted, sometimes obscure language, it did not identify a single recommendation that resulted in improvement, often stating flatly that the proposed change was not made.