Inside: Part 1 -
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JIM DWYER, KEVIN FLYNN and FORD FESSENDEN
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
From The New York Times on the Web (c) The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.
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 Lower Manhattan and watched as American Airlines Flight 11 flew directly overhead and crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
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.
More than eight years earlier, hundreds of firefighters came to the World Trade Center after terrorists tried to bomb one of the towers off its foundation. "Communications were a serious problem from the outset," Anthony L. Fusco, then chief of the department, had warned in a 1994 federal report on the Fire Department's response to that attack. They had lost touch with firefighters trying to extinguish the smoldering bomb crater underground, and with others who had climbed clear to the top of the towers.
Now, Chief 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, Chief Pfeifer said later.
Another fire chief arriving at the trade center tried a second repeater in his department car. That did not work, either.
As hundreds of firefighters climbed toward the upper floors where 1,100 people were trapped, one communications post after another was proving unreliable. Even commanders spread among four separate posts could not get through.
"I wasn't getting communications and I couldn't communicate into the building," Deputy Assistant Chief Albert J. Turi, now retired, said in an interview.
By 9:30 a.m., after both planes had struck, a rumor was circulating that a third hijacked plane was headed to New York. Assistant Chief Joseph Callan recalled feeling the north tower move. "I made the decision that the building was no longer safe," the chief told the Fire Department's oral history interviewers.
"All units in Building 1," he announced over the radio at 9:32. "All units in Building 1, come out, down to the lobby. Everybody down to the lobby."
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."
When Assistant Chief Donald J. Burns arrived, he reminded his colleagues of the severe communication problems during the 1993 bombing, Chief Hayden recalled. Commanders were forced that day to rely on runners to deliver vital messages. "Pre-plan and build contingency plans," Chief Burns wrote in the 1994 federal report. "Our effectiveness is only as good as our ability to communicate." On Sept. 11, he took command of operations in the south tower, the second building to be hit, and was killed.
The radios the firefighters carried into the buildings that day were identical to the ones they had brought into the trade center eight years earlier. By the department's own estimation, those radios, some of which were 15 years old, were outdated. "There were problems with the radios at virtually every high-rise fire," said Deputy Chief Nicholas J. Visconti, who was the commander in Midtown Manhattan for three years.
The radio problems, many officials say, are a symptom of the department's resistance to new technology. "We're dinosaurs," said Richard J. Sheirer, the former director of the city's Office of Emergency Management and a former fire dispatcher. David Rosensweig, the president of the fire alarm dispatchers' union, says the city has been talking for more than a decade about improving its computer-aided dispatch system.
Early in 2001, the department replaced its old analog radios with a new generation that used digital technology. The new models operated on higher frequencies and were judged somewhat better at penetrating buildings, but several firefighters said they had been unable to communicate in emergencies, so the digital radios were pulled from service in March 2001.
Other cities have been no swifter at solving the problems of communication at high-rise fires, industry professionals said.
The department did try to make some improvements after the terrorist bombing at the trade center in 1993, like the repeater installed on 5 World Trade Center to amplify the radio signal. The city police and Port Authority police have similar repeaters and neither agency experienced significant radio problems on Sept. 11, officials said.
Even now, the source of the Fire Department's radio problems remains murky. "I've asked five people in the Fire Department already, and I get a different answer from most of them," Mr. Von Essen said.
For a while, officials from the Fire Department and the Port Authority said the Fire Department repeater had been disabled by debris from the first plane. Now, however, Port Authority officials say they have proof that the repeater did work: tape recordings discovered in January or February with fire radio transmissions that were successfully routed through the repeater that day.
Some companies on higher floors were able to communicate. Squad 252 had been leaving the north tower, but it decided to help another company, Rescue 1, that was on a higher floor, said Firefighter Steve Modica, who heard the two companies talk over the radio. Neither company survived.
Other firefighters appear to have been using one radio channel while evacuation orders went out over another, according to the accounts of several firefighters.
In many other instances, firefighters said they simply never got the order to leave because the radio system worked only intermittently. Firefighter 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?"
Inside: Part 1 -
Part 2 -
Part 3 -
Part 4 -
Part 5
