Firefighters go after Rudy Giuliani with new video
Giuliani Bungled Preparation in Years After 1993 Attack on Trade Center.
Critical failures by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani before, during and after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, raise serious questions about his ability to be commander-in-chief.
In this thirteen minute documentary, fire fighters, fire officers and family members give dramatic testimony about Giuliani's leadership failures. Their dramatic stories tell how Giuliani failed to provide the FDNY with radios that worked, which led to the deaths of 121 fire fighters inside the World Trade Center's North Tower because they were unable to hear orders to evacuate.
3 comments:
The IAFF is a very liberal union that is not necessarily representative of its members political views. In recent years for example, they have endorsed losing candidates such as Al Gore and John Kerry.
I am intimately familiar with the IAFF and their political actions in my area. I am a volunteer firefighter in a combination system consisting of career union firefighters and volunteer firefighters. The IAFF local has only backed democrat candidates and has made vicious attempts to drive the volunteers from the system merely to increase the union rolls and political power, despite what that would mean to public safety in my community. I could go on regarding the IAFF and their political activities (I have good friends who are IAFF members in the local who are only to happy to relay what goes on), but suffice it to say that while I hold most of their members in high esteem, I have general disdain for the union and their tactics.
Rather than attacking the union, I'm more intere4sted in whether what they said about Giuliani and the radios was correct. Did he order dud radios without testing them? And why did he place the command centre in the twin towers AFTER they had been attacked?
It's about his judgement, not about how political the union is.
The 800MHz Motorola radios the FDNY used are in use by many major departments across the country, including mine and several jurisdictions surrounding mine. I know I have been in areas where the radios don't work well, which is why in high-rises, repeaters are often installed. Apparently they were installed in the WTC as well. This account explains a lot. This is further amplified by the 9/11 Commission report:
The FDNY's radios performed poorly during the 1993 WTC bombing for two reasons. First, the radios signals often did not succeed in penetrating the numerous steel and concrete floors that separated companies attempting to communicate; and second, so many different companies were attempting to use the same point-to-point channel that communications became unintelligible.
The Port Authority installed, at its own expense, a repeater system in 1994 to greatly enhance FDNY radio communications in the difficult high-rise environment of the Twin Towers. The repeater system was installed at the PA police desk in 5 WTC, to be activated by members of the PA police when the FDNY units responding to the WTC complex so requested. However, in the spring of 2000 the FDNY asked that an activation console for the repeater system be placed instead in the lobby fire saftey desk of each of the twin towers, making the FDNY personnel entirely responsible for its activation.
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One of the [FDNY] chiefs recommended testing the repeater channel to see if it would work. Earlier, an FDNY chief had asked building personnel to activate the repeater channel. One button on the repeater system activation console in the North Tower was pressed at 8:54, though it is unclear by whom. As a result of the activation, communications became possible between FDNY portable radios on the repeater channel. The activation of transmission on the master handset required, however, that a second button be pressed. That second button was never activated on the morning of September 11.
At 9:05, FDNY chiefs tested the WTC repeater system. Because the second button had not been activated, the chief on the master handset could not transmit....Because the repeater channel seemed inoperable, the chiefs in the North Tower lobby decided not to use it. The repeater system was working at least partially, however, on portable FDNY radios, and firefighters subsequently used repeater channel 7 in the South Tower.
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It is impossible to know what difference it made that units in the North Tower were not using the repeater channel after 10:00. While the repeater channel was at least partially operational before the South Tower collapsed, we do not know whether it continued to be operational after 9:59.
Regarding where the FDNY established their command of the incident, to my knowledge it was they who established it there (the mayor would not have been in the loop yet by the time the FDNY started the incident command system), which at the time was the norm for high-rise incidents. That is, incident command on high-rise fires occuring on upper floors was typically setup in the ln the lobbies and that's the way most urban departments (including the FDNY) did it.
To illustrate my point that this is just how things were done, let me quote from "fire Officer's Handbook of Tactics, Second Edition" (John Norman, 1998), in the Control of High-Rise Operations section:
The incident commander should be located in the building's lobby, where the command post should be established.
I could quote the same from other texts, and I was taught the same thing myself in training, but that should sufficiently illustrate my point.
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