FDNY Chief Cassano:

Is New York Ready For Another 9/11?

Urgent Communications 5/21/09

It's been nearly eight years since 9/11, and I wondered if New York was prepared for another large-scale incident. So I called up the chief of the New York City Fire Department, Salvatore Cassano, and asked him point blank: Can the city respond to another terrorist attack?

Cassano said the FDNY will be ready and capable of operating at full capacity if New York again became the target of a terrorist attack. He said a lot has changed since 2001. Overseeing all incidents in the city wasn't an option pre-9/11 because technology was not in place to support large-scale emergency operations. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, the FDNY command center consisted of a small operations armed with only couple phones and a couple of computer screens, he said. Even the most up-to-date equipment failed the department on 9/11 — simply because it didn't generate the type of information sharing across local, state and federal agencies.

"The [EOC] just was totally inefficient to handle any type of large-scale event. It was basically a notification center so if something happened they would notify people but that was it. There was no major system," he said. "We had very little information to send to the site at the World Trade Center, and I was getting very little information from the site to us to see what we could do for them. So we realized that it was totally inefficient — we knew that we needed a much better, improved state of the art operations center for future events."

Even with the best technologies in place, it was the on-the-fly decision making that had to be done on 9/11 that was the most challenging, Cassano said. New York and its first responders had only 102 minutes to make decisions. In that time, two planes crashed into two 100-story buildings, causing their collapse. Just think of the thousands of decisions that need to be made during such a short period of time.

So the department made changes over the last eight years. Two way radios often fail because in-building coverage is insufficient. Now, new radios are used; Teams bring along 25 lbs., 45 W radio into high-rise buildings to communicate. In addition, the city already invested $18 million to build out a new emergency operations center, where the chief can oversee operations out of the five city boroughs and monitor each incident from a centralized location (see Fire Chief's June 2009 issue). The operations center connects all of the stations, as well as the FDNY to local, state and federal agencies. It also controls an advanced vehicle location system that tracks all fire department apparatus and stores that information at headquarters. The chief now, from a remote location, can tell where all of his units are deployed and the type of incident — across the entire city — from one location. The EOC lets the chief get the most accurate, real-time information out to his field officers and firefighters at incidents, Cassano said.

The department also holds joint drills and table-top exercises.

"We have learned a tremendous lesson in interagency cooperation, sharing of information, being able to talk to each other," he said. "We've been doing it for seven years so if an event happens the response will be automatic."

Chief Cassano notes that New York City will always be a target for terrorism. In his heart, he hopes New York City won't suffer another terrorist attack. But if it does, "we will be ready," he said.