Vandalism at FDNY Firehouses as Six Stations Set to Close
Source Reprinted with Permission, New York Post
On the morning before six city firehouses were slated to close, the overhead doors to four other firehouses were smashed deliberately by a van yesterday, trapping firetrucks inside for over an hour.
The 45-minute Brooklyn spree of destruction came just hours after Mayor Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Nick Scoppetta conducted an abortive middle-of-the-night tour of the fire stations due to close this morning. The plan was cut short when they were heckled by outraged neighbors.
A witness told investigators a white van backed into the doors of Engine Co. 210, the last of the four houses to be struck.
Fire officials fear it might be the beginning of a series of backlashes against the scheduled closing of the six firehouses this morning.
"It absolutely does not help the effort to keep the houses open," Scoppetta said. "What this person did do was endanger lives in the community and act counterproductive to the movement."
Firefighters worked frantically to remove the doors and free their trucks, Scoppetta said, standing where the doors once stood at Engine Co. 210 on Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene.
"It could have been a terrible disaster," he said. "It's ridiculous, irrational and nothing short of outrageous."
The other firehouses vandalized yesterday are: Engine Co. 217 on DeKalb Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant; Engine Co. 235 on Monroe Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant; and Engine Co. 230 on Park Avenue in Williamsburg.
The firehouses' doors were rammed between 4:40 and 5:25 a.m.
Scoppetta said at least one person was awake at each of the firehouses.
As firefighters packed up their gear at Engine Co. 212 on Wyeth Avenue in Greenpoint, fliers posted in the neighborhood called for protests by "hundreds of angry North Side residents."
"This affects the community, not us," said one firefighter at Engine Co. 212. "It's sad the city put a price tag on their lives."
Kurt Hill, the outreach director of the People's Firehouse, a community group that sprang from a citizens' occupation of Engine Co. 212 that prevented it from closing in 1975, said his group plans only "nonviolent resistance, whether it's a picket line or lying down in the street or whatever."
Both the mayor's office and Scoppetta glossed over the mayor's retreat from his plans to visit all six of the doomed stations Friday night.
"The mayor was anxious to talk to the guys," Scoppetta said. "He looked them in the eye and said, 'I accept responsibility for this.'
"He wanted to visit them all, but we left at about 8 o'clock and finished at 11 o'clock."
With additional reporting by Stephanie Gaskell, Dan Kadison, Philip Messing and Andrea Peyser.
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