Community Resilience
Fire department rises to the challenge FIRE’s US Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on the Fire Department of New York’s response to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy last year
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t was hard to escape from news about Hurricane Sandy, the so-called ‘super storm’ that ravaged the eastern seaboard of the US in October last year. The Fire Department of New York (FDNY) was central to the preparation, response and recovery from one of the worst storms New York has suffered in modern times. This article looks at how the FDNY took on this challenge and draws on the findings from the 2013 FDNY Symposium which took place from March 14-15 at the FDNY Academy in New York City. It is a fascinating insight into how the largest fire and rescue service in the world has come such a long way since the tragic events of 9/11 to be prepared to deal with whatever is thrown at it, natural or otherwise. Incident Management Team Oversight of the FDNY response fell to the Incident Management Team, which had been set up as a direct response to the 2002
All photos courtesy of the Fire Department of New York
“To come out of Sandy with no injuries, no fatalities and recover was ‘one of the FDNY’s proudest moments’”
McKinsey Report. McKinsey and Company spent five months working with the FDNY to develop recommendations for change to enhance the FDNY’s preparedness post 9/11. The five borough command structure was also developed in response to the McKinsey Report. For Hurricane Sandy, each Borough Commander (known by the title ‘Chief’ here) was given autonomy to manage their borough’s response. The impact on each borough was different, and, in the case of Queens in particular, within the borough itself the impact was quite polarised. “The storm who cried wolf”, is how one speaker described the response by some New Yorkers to the impending hurricane. Hurricane Irene had visited the US in August 2011. Evacuation plans were put in place and carried out which displaced many people who were not affected by the hurricane: it was nowhere near as severe as had been expected. Two years May 2013 | www.fire–magazine.com | 49
Community Resilience later the same residents decided that they had been inconvenienced last time and did not want that again, but they underestimated the severity of Hurricane Sandy and their unwillingness to evacuate put themselves at risk. Forty-eight New Yorkers lost their lives as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Protecting infrastructure was a key part of the plans put in place by the Incident Management Team. Shutting down electricity sub-stations, turning off steam supplies (a common form of communal heating to the large apartment buildings of Manhattan in particular) and turning off the gas supply were vital to both reduce risk of fire and accelerate recovery post storm. In the After Action Review held by the FDNY it recognised more could have been done to better coordinate with the utility companies. A comprehensive pre-emptive move to shut down all utility supplies would have avoided many of the fires that broke out. On November 13, two weeks after the storm, residents of Long Island filed a summons against the Long Island Power Authority and National Grid for failing to, inter alia, “reconfigure the substations which transfer power to thousands of homes to minimize flood damage” and for having “grossly underbudgeted for storm response where there are large scale outages”. Widespread Destruction One of the iconic images of the hurricane was the collapsed crane at 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan. In the middle of a business district, the crane bent precariously from its 73 storey building under construction. FDNY staff had to walk up 73 flights of stairs when the external
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Protecting infrastructure was a key part of the plans put in place by the Incident Management Team
“One speaker described the bizarre situation where FDNY staff did not know where they were because the street signs and house numbers were under water”
elevator stopped working and carry out their risk assessment in 80 mile per hour winds. Had the crane toppled to the ground, it would have landed on the site of a steam distribution site, the rupture of which would have taken out the whole block. Because of this, 15 apartment buildings in the vicinity were evacuated. Con Edison, the main supplier of electricity in the city, closed off the steam and the crane was secured enough to get through the storm. FDNY staff stayed at the scene for 81 hours until the crane was secured. It took another week before the crane could be cranked back and secured to the building. Over three months later the crane has only just been brought down and replaced so that work can continue on this building. The crane collapse marked the beginning of a series of incidents that stretched the FDNY across the whole of the five boroughs and saw staff making decisions to let buildings burn out because to stay meant that the fire appliances would be trapped by rising flood waters. In parts of Brooklyn, staff had to halt their appliances because to carry on would have meant the communications equipment beneath the vehicle would have been flooded out as water levels rose over two feet. One speaker described the bizarre situation where FDNY staff did not know where they were because the street signs and house numbers were under water. Part of the After Action Review suggested retrofitting appliances to move exhausts higher up the appliance and to relocate the communications equipment from underneath, along with adding GPS to all appliances. At the height of the storm there were 980 calls per minute to 911 from Queens alone. Entire blocks of housing out in the borough were on fire as electrical fires burnt out one house before moving on to the next in the high winds and with no fire breaks to halt their progress. Fire spread between houses, with “baseball sized embers” carried by high winds. In one part of Queens, Breezy Point, a firefighter was forced to dive under flood water to connect a hose to the hydrant. As one speaker said that the irony of being eight feet underwater but unable to put out the fires was not lost on them that night. Breezy Point also saw a 50 foot whale beach itself and with FDNY pumps, staff
Community Resilience managed to hydrate the whale before the tide could take it back out to sea. Unfortunately the whale died and beached itself once more. One of the most fascinating examples of work in extreme conditions emerged from the PATH station. PATH stands for the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, the river between Manhattan’s west side and its neighbouring state of New Jersey. Underneath there are two one-mile long train tunnels which shuttle commuters between the two states. When the tunnels flooded it took a 24/7 operation over seven days to empty just one tunnel; pumping 10 million gallons of water back out into the Hudson River. With FDNY staff working 12 hours shifts wearing four hour breathing apparatus and suits working in contaminated water and equally contaminated air from the diesel fuel in the pumps, there was little time to decontaminate suits and under these conditions bleach and water was used just to make them bearable for the next shift. “Putting rank aside and getting the job done”. This quote from Chief Maynes shows the determined approach the FDNY had to helping New York recover from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Best summarised in a few key statistics with more than: • 31,000 homes and businesses searched (mostly in the Rockaways) • 1006 emergency chainsaw assignments (tree debris was a significant problem) • 3,250 trees removed from roadways (mostly in Queens) • 2,700 basements pumped out • 250 streets cleared of sand. Recovery Effort The FDNY Bureau of Fire Prevention also had a key role to play in the recovery effort. It was focused on two key tasks: managing the inflow of combustible energy into New York and bringing commercial buildings back into action. The extensive damage to many of the buildings of Lower Manhattan was mainly to basements and for these buildings that meant that the energy supplies to the building were out of action and in most cases had to be replaced. Not a trivial task. Bureau Chief, Thomas Jensen, said that $18 million worth of damage had been calculated in one building alone. For many buildings, the impact of the hurricane was that they no longer complied with New York building codes. For some, temporary relief from the New York City Fire Code was the solution, but because of the high density of buildings, this was strictly monitored. The increased use of propanefuelled dehumidifiers, used to dry out buildings, represented a substantial increase in risk. Chief Jensen reported that there were no accidents related to temporary fuel supplies during this time. Whilst there were no deaths or injuries to FDNY staff, the psychological impact on them and their families is less obvious. The FDNY Counselling and Family Assistance Units assisted
At the height of the storm there were 980 calls per minute to 911 from Queens alone
“They underestimated the severity of Hurricane Sandy and their unwillingness to evacuate put themselves at risk. Forty-eight New Yorkers lost their lives as a result of Hurricane Sandy”
FDNY members impacted by the storm. In addition to this, the FDNY Foundation, which is the official not for profit organisation of the FDNY, helped active FDNY members that had homes which were seriously impacted by the hurricane. Thanks to donations from concerned individuals to the FDNY Foundation, they were able to provide relief funds to 947 Active FDNY members to help them in rebuilding their homes. Chief Maynes made an interesting observation when he said that Hurricane Sandy offered new recruits to the FDNY an opportunity to show what they could do. I spoke to Chief Maynes afterwards and asked him whether staff who joined after 2001 were seeking their own identity post 9/11, in a sense, to have their own story. He said it was more about showing that the training, the investment in equipment and the general preparedness could work and did work. That to come out of Sandy with no injuries, no fatalities and recover was “one of the FDNY’s proudest moments”. References McKinsey Report – Increasing FDNY’s Preparedness can be found at: http://www.nyc. gov/html/fdny/html/mck_report/toc.html A copy of the summons can be found at: http:// cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/lipaclass-action-lawsuit.pdf Taken from With New York Firefighters, the journal of the FDNY, 4/2012. May 2013 | www.fire–magazine.com | 51