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by their own after fatal blaze - to be in field in weeks
The Fire Department showed off its new rope and safety harness for firefighters yesterday, some five years after an earlier system was taken away, apparently to save money.
The latest gear, developed after two firefighters plunged to their deaths during a January blaze, will cost $11 million and should be in the field within two months, officials said.
The slender, 50-foot ropes will be able to withstand high temperatures for more than two minutes and, with the harnesses, hold 4,000 pounds - more than 10 times the weight of the average firefighter loaded up with full equipment.
They will be regulated by a device that locks if a firefighter goes into free fall, and they are anchored by a sharp hook that can be embedded into a window frame. The hook also can be run around a radiator or heavy object and slipped back over the rope to form a loop.
"In a matter of 10 seconds, you can be out the window and in a safe place," a heavily outfitted Capt. Michael Hayes told reporters after a demonstration at the Fire Academy on Randalls Island.
Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said work on the new safety ropes and harness began immediately after the Bronx tenement fire on Jan. 23, in which Lt. Curtis Meyran and Firefighter John Bellew jumped to their deaths to escape a fourth-floor inferno.
Four other firefighters were badly injured when they escaped through a window, but two may have been spared worse injuries by using an unauthorized personal rope one of them carried.
Those ropes had been in use during the 1990s but were pulled from service and not replaced in what union officials and some retired senior officers said was a cost-cutting move.
The personal ropes will be used in addition to larger ropes - sometimes called roof ropes or lifesaving ropes - that already are carried by each ladder company that carries out searches, sometimes above the floors of a fires.
Officials said they were dissatisfied with all the current personal ropes products and decided to fashion their own rope and harness.
Firefighters were quick to offer opinions when word of the project got out, according to Lt. Timothy Kelly, who works at Rescue 4 in Woodside.
"We took the different approaches and mixed and matched," he said. The hook turned out to be the biggest innovation, he said, and he credited Lt. Christian Delisio and Firefighter George Garmmas for forging prototypes and coming up with the final design.
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