Its Ranks Depleted, a Weary Fire Dept. Is Trying to Regroup
ALAN FEUER and MICHAEL WILSON
Reprinted with Permission, The New York Times
There are several ways to describe how the past 12 months have gone for the
New York City Fire Department, and none of them are good.
The numbers speak for themselves - 343 killed; 91 vehicles destroyed; 213
members of the senior command lost to retirement; $104 million paid out in
death benefits; as many as 500 firefighters at risk of leaving the force
because of lung damage suffered at ground zero; 4,971 applicants for the
department, a fraction of the 25,000 or so who typically apply in a given
year; 4,400 years of collective experience vaporized in the span of some 30
minutes.
The images speak, as well - mountains of flowers placed outside firehouse
doors across the city, a sea of white-gloved men and women standing at
attention as another coffin was carried from another church, blackened
bunker gear, a tattered flag.
Beyond the statistics and the emblems, however, lies the swerving emotional
course of this past year, which cannot be described by the department's own
members - at least not clearly.
Somehow, the firefighters of New York confronted death, guilt, deification,
disillusionment, fear, hordes of tourists and the numbness of having to tell
their stories over and over again, and yet still mostly managed to go out
each day to do their jobs. They are tired and overwhelmed. They are, by and
large, sick of their own pain.
It has shown. They scuffled with the police after the city reduced their
numbers on search-and-recovery teams at ground zero. The families of their
lost comrades made millions through charitable donations but worried, with
reason, about being tarred as rich beyond need. Some members have sued the
city, contending negligence in endangering their health at the ground zero
cleanup. Firefighters submitted to both an internal critique and a highly
public one, and winced when it was found that their chiefs were at sea as
disaster struck.
Though bond traders and janitors died the day the towers came down, it was
firefighters who emerged from the rubble as the face of last year's tragedy.
The department did not quite ask to be a national symbol of grief and
perseverance, but its members have grieved and persevered, in public,
nonetheless.
"You can't go through life being a World Trade Center survivor, right?" one
lieutenant said. "You've got to do other stuff."
A year has passed for the survivors, and in recent weeks city officials and
the department's own leaders have taken steps toward assessing where the
11,100-member force now stands and how best to rebuild and improve it. The
steps, large and small, have included everything from an overhaul of the
department's top management to a new policy ordering ambulances to bear
placards making clear they are not terrorists in clever disguise.
The first priority has been to replace the 343 dead men, nearly 50 times the
number - 7 - who die in the line of duty in any average year. The department
lost 20 percent of its elite forces and 42 members of its five rescue units,
which are called upon to save fellow firefighters in distress.
In the aftermath of the attacks, the department scrapped entry requirements
to allow recruits who have not finished college to begin training. It pushed
through classes of roughly double the normal size. The first, a class of
313, was sworn in last November. A fourth class graduated in July.
Because the department lost so many of its officers, including its first
deputy commissioner and its chief of department, it has pushed through 671
promotions since last September. There is a new chief of department, a new
chief of operations, 3 new assistant chiefs, 14 deputy assistant chiefs, 29
new deputy chiefs, 71 new battalion chiefs, 179 new captains and 331 new
lieutenants.
The department's top management was reorganized and expanded as well, under
a plan set forth by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last month. At its core, the
plan called for increasing the number of staff chiefs, the department's
highest-ranking uniformed members, to 18 from 10. Five of these men were
given direct authority over each of New York's five boroughs, instead of
each of them being responsible for the entire city.
The staff chiefs also traded the timeworn practice of working 24 hours
straight and then taking three days off for a regular five-day workweek.
Mayor Bloomberg has said the department's managers should match their work
schedules to the rest of the city's business week.
Retirements Drain Force
In a single morning, the collapsing towers killed more men than are usually
in an entire class at the Fire Academy, and yet, some officials say, the
impending flood tide of retirements will be just as damaging to the force.
Scores of the department's supervisors, including some of its most senior
commanders, have retired since last September and hundreds more have
notified their union that they expect to leave in the next year. The same
mass exodus is occurring among frontline firefighters: they are retiring at
more than double the usual rate.
"The retirement thing is going to be, in retrospect, the worst thing that
has happened to the New York Fire Department post-9/11, bar none," said
Stephen J. Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association.
According to the department, 747 firefighters of all ranks filed retirement
papers over the last 11 months, compared with 475 who had retired in the
same period a year ago. Of late, about 40 firefighters have been retiring
every week. A year ago, 40 firefighters might have retired in a typical
month.
While some have elected to leave because of emotional or physical
exhaustion, many more have chosen to go because it makes good financial
sense: their retirement pay is based on their last year's salary, and in the
months after the disaster, they have increased their salaries with huge
amounts of overtime.
The loss of a vast pool of experience in the trade center disaster was bad
enough, officials say. Add to that the loss of veteran firefighters through
retirements, and the process of breaking in new recruits grows twice as
hard.
"Experience is key in fighting fires," said Capt. Al Hagan of Ladder 43 in
Harlem. "In probie school, they teach you the choreography, the cha-cha, the
tango, and now the music starts. Can you perform with the music on? Well, at
the beginning, you can't.
"You get 10 new guys in a fire, when the fight-or-flee reflex hits, flee
will take over. You need, `Don't worry, kid, you're doing good, stick with
me.' I have six probies in my house right now. Brand new. Still tissue paper
around them."
Lt. Ewald Pollich, 59, attended a recent retirement seminar put on by the
department. He is leaving because of his enhanced pension after all the
overtime. He is also broken up about it. He was one of dozens at the
seminar.
"It's a very personal and tough process," he said. "You love the job and
you're finalizing it. You're coming down to this. It's over."
But it will not be over, of course, for those left on the job.
"The guys in the department are going to take a tough hit in terms of
safety," said Lt. Larry Flaim, who is training newly promoted supervisors.
"There's 300 probies out of probie school they're pumping out. It's not that
you have inexperienced firefighters. You have probies with no experience.
I'm totally torn. The guys of my era constantly talk about this."
Moving to Repair Flaws
Last month, McKinsey & Company, an independent consultant, produced a report
on the Fire Department's response to the trade center attack. While the
effort was brave and aggressive, the report concluded, it was also plagued
by communications problems, lapses in discipline and a lack of coordination
with the police.
It said, for example, that when Assistant Chief Joseph Callan issued an
evacuation order over the radio at 9:30 a.m., roughly an hour before the
north tower fell, "there was no acknowledgment by firefighters."
To improve communications, the department has ordered new radios that it
believes are at least modestly better at penetrating high-rise buildings
than the old ones and are capable of linking with police channels. It has
asked the federal government for $60 million to install repeaters, which
boost radio signals, on many tall structures and is talking with the Police
Department about sharing the network of 300 police radio stations across the
city, Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said.
The Fire and Police Departments have a long history of competition, and
friction at emergency scenes is legendary. Coordination between the two
forces was so poor last year that a police helicopter pilot, hovering over
the north tower, radioed at 10:07 a.m., "I don't think this has too much
longer to go." Most firefighters never heard the warning.
Earlier this year, Commissioner Scoppetta announced the creation of an
interdepartmental committee of high-ranking police and fire officials. A
fire chief is now stationed permanently at 1 Police Plaza, and a police
captain now works as a liaison at the Fire Department's headquarters. Fire
chiefs will now be allowed to fly with police pilots over burning buildings.
Mr. Scoppetta said he himself meets regularly with Raymond W. Kelly, the
police commissioner.
The Fire Department has always been proud of its roguish, outlaw spirit, an
attitude that stretches back to its earliest days, when firehouses were not
city-run outfits, but private gangs that often battled one another on the
way to battling fires.
When the planes hit last year, scores of firefighters rushed from their
second jobs to the trade center. Many bypassed staging areas and their own
commanding officers. There was a mad rush to the scene. Sixty off-duty
firefighters died.
The impulse was admirable: it was a selfless struggle to save the
endangered. The benefit of hindsight shows it was also fatally reckless.
Lt. Peter Sapienza was in Italy when the towers fell and said, had he been
in New York, his instincts would have probably gotten him killed.
"If I wasn't in Italy, I would have run down there at 9 in the morning and
run up in the building with no equipment and no radio," he said. "And I'd be
dead."
The department has started to rethink how it plans to deal with terrorist
attacks. Instead of sending three of its five rescue units, for example, it
may send only two. It will also keep its sole hazardous material unit far
from the scene, to protect it in case its expertise is needed later. Most
important, it will not send so many chiefs and firefighters to the scene.
"You don't fight a war by having every four-star general go to the front
lines," Mr. Scoppetta said.
Hardest Step: Seeking Help
The country seems to be on a war footing now, and in wartime there are
casualties. There are mental strains and breakdowns. There are heroes, too.
The department has identified the remains of 204 of the 343 dead men, and
the ghosts of the missing hover in firehouses like an old, familiar song
playing in the other room. The ghosts are present every time a new guy sits
in a dead man's favorite chair. They are present in the riding boards - the
chalkboards listing the names of the men on tour - that have hung, unerased,
on some firehouse walls ever since that day.
The job seems different now, firefighters say. It is more about fighting
terrorism than fighting fires. They sell T-shirts and pose for pictures.
They have guilt and nightmares and see body parts when they close their
eyes.
"It's not the same," said Firefighter Bobby Annunziato, a 19-year veteran.
"It's no fun coming to the firehouse. The guys are great, but you don't know
what's out there. It's crazy out there, this terrorism stuff."
At first, the public attention helped the healing. The hugs and candles, the
articles and casseroles, covered up deep wounds like a scab. The attention
also pushed away the anguish. They could talk to the tourists, or the
television cameras, instead of talking about themselves.
With the summer, however, came the first halting steps toward normalcy. It
was time, many felt, to be left alone.
"People come by and come by and come by, and you feel like saying, `Enough
is enough,' " said Byron Bodine, a firefighter. "But that's their way."
Nearly 3,000 firefighters have sought in-house counseling in the last 12
months, and yet their public image makes them skeptical of looking for help.
It is a "Not me, I'm fine" phenomenon. Firefighters have been trained to
ask, "How are you?"
Firefighter Annunziato finally sought help 358 days after the attacks. He
returned from his session - "cuckoo time," in the harsh parlance of the
firehouse - with orders to take time off.
"I'd been bucking it," he said. "I'd been trying to say I don't need it, I
don't need it."
Malachy Corrigan, director of the department's counseling service unit, said
the number of those seeking assistance may actually increase after the
anniversary.
"I think there's a profound sadness, and the public nature of the grief has
impacted on the members of the department and elongated it," he said. He
said the stamp of "hero" only stalls self-help. "Can heroes feel bad?" he
asked. "Can they grieve? Can they be angry? For the person that's put on a
pedestal, how do you get down? You don't want to fall off," he went on. "You
want to get down gradually."
Like many engine drivers, or chauffeurs, Firefighter Jack Butler of Engine 6
in Lower Manhattan was the only member of his unit to survive because he was
on the rig outside the towers. He tried one recent day to sum up where the
department stood. He sounded unsure, no longer trusting that even the
public's admiration and affection would last.
"At some point in time, you have to step back and move on," Firefighter
Butler, 56, said. "I don't know, after this anniversary, if people are going
to keep coming. You know what I mean? For the general public, I wonder if
they are going to keep coming by?"
From The New York Times on the Web (c) The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.
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