An Editorial By NEIL MUNRO
Reprinted with Permission, The Oakland Press
Originally Published July 11, 2002 -- News of the 9/11 tragedy in New York City traveled coast to coast and around the world. Everybody in uniform was a hero.
But news of what really happened hasn't gotten beyond the Hudson River, for all practical purposes.
Extensive investigations into the operations of the New York fire department, police department and the Port Authority police were conducted by the U.S. Naval War College and reported in the media, but mainly locally.
That's because of a basic finding that the fire department, especially, was all but out of control. There was a lack of discipline and a predictable equipment failure, mainly of communication.
Despite the fact that the department's leaders had concluded from the outset that the World Trade Center fires were "unfightable," crews were sent in with fighting it in mind.
Scores of off-duty firefighters put on gear and rushed to the scene without telling anyone in authority they were there. On-duty personnel in some cases refused to stay away.
Ambulances flocked to the scene. Port Authority police left their normal posts, despite orders to stay.
The result was, among other things, that 400 ambulance calls went unanswered and the region's tunnels and bridges were left undefended in the immediate wake of what was an obvious terrorist attack. The police and fire operations refused to pay any attention to each other, as was their long-standing habit.
That's one of the reasons helicopters were not used to rescue people trapped on the floors above where the airliners hit.
Fire Department crews could not be communicated with. That's despite the fact that stranded people easily called families and so forth on cell phones.
In other words, instead of performing heroically, the foot soldiers of the departments acted like a mob to the extent that most of those who died did so recklessly and in vain.
It was a macho madhouse. Firefighters were trying to drag flame-fighting gear up 80 stories to fight a fire their superiors already had determined was beyond control. The same climb in the wake of the earlier Trade Center bombing had taken as much as four hours.
Firefighters milled about in the tower still standing, trying to find someone to tell them what to do and not realizing the one next to it had collapsed.
And what happened was not a surprise - or shouldn't have been.
Earlier major disasters had found the firefighters defying their commanders to play cowboy. It seems that they all want to be where the action is, which is why they take such jobs in the first place. Nobody wants to stay behind to handle other, lesser emergencies.
But it's childish behavior.
The police accuse the firefighters of lacking the paramilitary discipline police agencies employ. And it seems they're right, at least in the case of New York City.
It's too bad all concerned had to be exposed as inadequate in what was their time of glory. Yet they meant well and remain heroes in their own way, even though their bravery, too often, actually was foolhardy.
