from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/134489238_wtc070.html
Why police made it out of the
By Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn and Ford Fessenden
The New York Times
Seconds later, another pilot reported: "I don't think
this has too much longer to go. I would evacuate all people within the area of
that second building."
Those clear warnings, captured on police radio tapes, were
transmitted 21 minutes before the building fell, and officials say they were
relayed to police officers, most of whom managed to
escape. Yet most firefighters never heard those warnings or earlier orders to
get out. Their radio system failed frequently that morning. Even if the radio
network had been reliable, it was not linked to the police system. And the
police and fire commanders guiding the rescue efforts did not talk to one
another during the crisis.
Cut off from critical information, at least 121
firefighters, most in running distance of safety, died when the north tower
fell, an analysis by The New York Times has found.
Faced with devastating attacks, the city's emergency
personnel formed an indelible canvas of sacrifice, man by man and woman by
woman. They helped rescue thousands. They saved lives. They risked their own.
From the first moments to the last, however, their efforts
were plagued by failures of communication, command and control.
Now, the Fire and Police departments are approaching the end
of delicate internal reviews of their responses to the attack. Those reviews
have concluded that major changes are needed in how the agencies go about their
work and prepare for the next disaster, senior officials say.
A six-month examination by The New York Times found that the
rescuers' ability to save themselves and others was hobbled by technical
difficulties, a history of tribal feuding and management lapses that have been
part of the emergency-response culture in New York City and other regions for
years.
To explore the emergency response on Sept. 11, Times
reporters interviewed more than 100 firefighters, police officers, emergency
medical workers, government officials and witnesses. Those interviews were
supplemented by reviews of 1,000 pages of oral histories collected by the Fire
Department, 20 hours of police and fire radio transmissions and 4,000 pages of
city records, and by creating a database that tracked 2,500 eyewitness reports
of sightings of fire companies, individual firefighters and other rescue
personnel that morning. The city has refused to release thousands of pages of
accounts by firefighters and their superiors.
The Fire Department began its first self-examination in
December, when nearly 50 senior fire officials took part in a two-day planning
exercise with the U.S. Naval War College. The college evaluators concluded:
"As a function of command and control, it was evident that the Fire
Department has no formal system to evaluate problems or develop plans for
multiple complex events. It was equally evident that the Fire Department has
conducted very little formal planning at the operational level."
Thomas Von Essen, the city's fire
commissioner from 1996 through 2001, and a former president of the main fire
union, said he agreed with that analysis, which was done to check the ability
to respond to major disasters. The fire commissioner has limited authority to
hold senior chiefs accountable, Von Essen said,
because nearly all have Civil Service protection.
"The pain is still there, and it'll be there forever,"
Von Essen said. "But you have to start thinking
about the reality of the world that we live in today. And that demands better
leadership, more accountable leadership, a better-trained
leadership, a more disciplined leadership that then filters down to a better-trained
and more disciplined set of troops."
Many chiefs, for their part, have long cited Von Essen's leadership as a major department failing. The
results of other reviews, covering police and fire performance, are due within
a few weeks from the consulting firm McKinsey &
Co.
For Von Essen, a searing topic is
the high number of firefighter casualties in the north tower. The collapse of
the south tower after 57 minutes shocked the fire commanders. Yet more than a
third of the 343 firefighter deaths were in the north tower, even though it
stood 29 minutes longer. The failure of more firefighters to escape in those 29
minutes baffles Von Essen. He believes many got word
to leave. "Should we know the answers to all of that stuff by now? Absolutely. But do we really want to know the answers to
these questions? I don't think the department really wants to know."
He could not explain why the police had not reported to fire
commanders, the official leaders of the response. "That day the police did
not hook up with the Fire Department," Von Essen
said. "I don't know why."
Too many firefighters, he said, were sent into the towers,
and too many came without being told they were needed. "I've been a
firefighter since 1970 and have often stood on floors where we needed 10 people
and had 30," Von Essen said. "There's a
lack of control that's dangerous on an everyday basis to firefighters."
Von Essen and Police Commissioner
Raymond Kelly both said that rigorous scrutiny of their agencies was vital.
Communication problems
Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer held his two-way radio to his
ear. He tried to edge away from the noise in the north-tower lobby, hoping the
reception would improve. Still no good. Minutes
before, he stood on a street corner in
Now, as the first chief to reach the building, he was
sending fire companies up the stairs, including one led by his own brother, Lt.
Kevin Pfeifer, who did not survive. Then he found that he had no way to speak
with the rescuers starting the long climb: Once again, the firefighters were
having terrible radio problems inside this high-rise building.
Now, Pfeifer tried to turn on a device known as a repeater,
which had been installed at 5 World Trade Center to help solve those problems
by boosting the radio-signal strength. The repeater didn't seem to be working,
Pfeifer said later.
Another fire chief arriving at the trade center tried a
second repeater in his department car. That did not work, either.
By
"All units in Building 1," he announced over the
radio at
Virtually no one answered his call. It seemed that few
people, apart from those standing near him, heard it. Chief Peter Hayden, who
was at the scene, said: "We had ordered the firefighters down, but we
weren't getting acknowledgments. We were very concerned about it."
By the department's own estimation, the radios they used,
some 15 years old, were outdated.
In many instances, firefighters said they simply never got
the order to leave because the radio system worked only intermittently. Firefighter
Steve Modica said he tried different channels, without
success, to reach a friend who had gone up ahead of him.
"It's a disgrace," he said. "The police are
talking to each other. It's a no-brainer: Get us what they're using. We send
people to the moon, and you mean to tell me a firefighter can't talk to a guy
two floors above him?"
Agencies don't cooperate
Nearly every state, including New York, and the federal
government have adopted a structure for managing crises known as the incident-command
system, in which agencies agree in advance who will be in charge.
Allen Hoehl, a retired police
commander, disputed the idea that officers routinely refuse to work with fire
officials. He said he had often designated a ranking officer to serve as a
liaison.
Other police officials maintain that sharing command with
the Fire Department is difficult because firefighters lack paramilitary
discipline.
Lt. John McArdle, a member of the
police Emergency Service Unit, was blunt in his views of the firefighters.
"If someone tells them to do something, they say, 'I don't work for him,' "
he said. "If a police sergeant tells a group of
cops to hold up, they do."
Senior fire chiefs spelled out their resentment of the
police during the
After years of bickering, the two agencies did not squabble
on Sept. 11. They simply did not communicate. "There was not a link,"
Kelly acknowledged.
On that morning, the Police Department's elite Emergency
Service Unit (ESU) sent teams into both towers. Trained in rescue tactics, the
ESU officers often tackle the same kinds of work as firefighters.
In the stairwells, members of both services helped each
other carry equipment, administer first aid and pass messages.
The police emergency officers did not, however, check in
with the fire commanders who were in charge of the rescue.
Bypassing commanders
News of the trade-center attacks broke as shifts changed at
firehouses across the city. At Ladder Co. 16 on
"A person can control a certain amount of people,"
he said. "I was in the military, the Marine Corps, for four years, in
The men got off. Then they went outside and caught rides to
the trade center in a police car and a city bus. One was killed in the collapse
of the north tower.
He was among the 60 off-duty firefighters to die. Some came
from second jobs, one from a golf course. Many bypassed staging areas and
commanders with whom they were supposed to check in, fire officials said. Several
on-duty companies led by veteran officers did the same.
Those who responded so impulsively were upholding the Fire
Department's finest tradition: the selfless struggle to save the endangered. But
they were also rushing to fight a fire that department officials had already
decided was unfightable. And they did so in such
numbers, with so little coordination, that some fire officials are questioning
whether the department known as the bravest acted too bravely that day.
Lt. Brian Becker, who escaped from the north tower with his
unit, Engine Co. 28, said it was simplistic to view the day in terms of heroism
or blame.
"It was a series of random events that killed thousands
and saved hundreds," he said. "Not many people did anything right
that day, but not many people did anything wrong that day either."
Above the impact zone, 800 people were trapped. Below it,
the dying north tower was emptying. After more than an hour of evacuation, the
stream of civilians was a trickle.
Then the south tower fell, and people watched around the
world.
Not across the plaza. There, the crash registered only as a
shudder in the bones of people up and down the north tower. "Everybody
felt it, and they didn't know exactly what it was," Firefighter Frank Campagna said in an oral-history interview. "The
building was still standing," he said. "So we just kept going up the
stairs."
On the 51st floor, three court officers felt the violent
lurch and decided to get out. "We did not know that the south tower
collapsed — never mind that the north tower was going to go," said Deputy
Chief Joseph Baccellieri, who had rushed into the
tower along with two other court officers, Sgts. Alfred
Moscola and Andrew Wender. The
three started down.
On the 35th floor, Lt. Gregg Hansson
of Engine 24 had just spoken with Battalion Chief Richard Picciotto,
when a cry of "Mayday! Evacuate the building" came over the chief's
radio. "I get about halfway down the hall and the building starts shaking,"
Hansson said.
Picciotto hollered "Mayday!"
to the four other fire companies on the 35th floor. Hansson
and his men went to Staircase A. In the stairwell, they saw Lt. John Fischer of
Ladder 20, who noticed that two of his men had continued up. "He couldn't
get them on the radio, so he went to walk up and go get them," Hansson said. "I said, 'All right, well I'm going
down, I'm taking my men down.' And that's the last time I saw him."
Somewhere around the 28th or 30th floor, Campagna,
who had kept climbing after the first tower fell, ran into a crowd of resting
firefighters. "A chief came down from a floor above with another company
and said, 'Everybody evacuate, everybody out now,' " he recalled. Campagna and his company, Engine 28, turned around, and all
survived.
Hansson stopped at the 27th floor
to pick up a firefighter who had stayed with a man in a wheelchair and his
friend. Then Capt. William Burke Jr. of Engine 21 arrived. "Somehow, it
was decided that Burke was going to take them down," Hansson
said. The captain and two men were killed.
As the court officers made their way down, they were hearing
urgent evacuation messages through police officers' radios, Wender
said. On the 19th floor, they came upon a sight they recall vividly. "The
hallway was filled with firemen," Wender said.
"Some of them were lying down. Ax against the wall. Legs extended. Arm resting against their oxygen tank. Completely
exhausted. It led me to believe they were not hearing what we were
hearing."
Baccellieri recalled seeing "at
least 100 of them." When he shouted that rescuers were evacuating, no one
moved. "They said, 'We'll come down in a few minutes,' " Baccellieri said. "These
firemen had no idea that the south tower collapsed."
Near the lobby, Hansson and his
men helped remove a heavy man with some Port Authority police officers. They
tied the man to a chair with a belt. They barely made it through the door when
the tower began collapsing.
Among those who escaped with little time to spare was Susan
Frederick. After descending from the 80th floor to about the third, she found
the stairway blocked. Behind her, some three dozen people stretched up the
stairs.
Minutes later, word spread of a way out. A firefighter had
broken through an office wall with an ax.
Daylight filtered faintly through the hole, pointing to the
mezzanine and the street.
"Come this way — move quickly!" the firefighter
yelled,
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