FDNY to City: You're Damaging the Health of Your Firefighters

New York City's firefighters' union has some big complaints with the city, and this morning it laid out a litany of what it calls serious health and safety violations that are not being addressed. Among the complaints are issues the union considers to be major problems, like what it says is a failure on the city's part to develop a formal procedure to respond to major disasters like that of September 11th, 2001.

The union says quality of health care at the FDNY medical office, "is declining rapidly," and that nurses have been notified they may be laid off to save money.

The union also listed some day-to-day quality of life problems like deteriorating, rodent-infested firehouses.

"The Uniformed Firefighters Association is presently voicing its strong concern on a number of health, safety and quality of life issues that we feel the New York City Fire Department has chosen to ignore," the union said in a letter to the department last week. "We believe these issues are having an ongoing negative impact on the emotional and physical well-being of our firefighters," the letter said.

The letter was one of scores of documents released by the union at a morning news conference at which it laid out nine major areas of concern. We'll have more on the story, and the city's response, tonight on Eyewitness News starting at 5:00pm.