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The Fire Department's decision not to conduct safety inspections at the Deutsche Bank building because of concern about toxins within the structure near the World Trade Center site brings to mind a policy in the late 1970s by the Police Department not to have patrol cops enter known drug locations.
The decision by then-Police Commissioner Bob McGuire was rooted in the problems uncovered during the Knapp Commission investigations of police corruption earlier in the decade. Worried that patrol cops might be susceptible to bribe offers once inside a building where drugs were being sold, the NYPD decided it was safer to confine anti-drug activities to cops working in special units.
By the time this policy was scrapped by Mr. McGuire's successor, Ben Ward, in the mid-1980s, the city was confronting a crack epidemic.
The lesson inherent in that experience was that a law-enforcement agency can't relax its enforcement efforts because of peripheral concerns, even if there is validity to them. The Fire Department learned that lesson the hard way, with Firefighters Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia paying with their lives.
The outrage of Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy and many of his members was understandable. Firefighters and officers expect negligence from those outside the department: it plays a role in many of the fires that justify their existence.
They do not, however, expect the department to place them at a disadvantage with its decisions. That is what happened at the Deutsche Bank fire. The failure to conduct inspections meant that plywood and plastic that had been erected by demolition workers actually helped to feed the fire. It had been 11 years since the building's standpipe system was checked to make sure that water could be transmitted to a fire scene; it turned out that part of the standpipe had been dismantled, and so water wound up flooding the basement rather than reaching the fire 17 floors above. One of the worst ironies of the lack of inspections was cited by Mr. Cassidy this past weekend: that the fire released toxins into the air that could adversely affect the health of the more-than 250 firefighters who responded to the blaze. And so the department's decision not to inspect out of concern about exposure for the members of a single engine company has put many more firefighters at risk.
The administration's decision to relieve three fire officers of their commands was denounced by the Uniformed Fire Officers Association as a "rush to judgment." Mayor Bloomberg contended, however, that they bore responsibility for the decision to forego inspections at the building and termed that conduct "simply not excusable." While the three officers have not been demoted, it has to be painful for them to be publicly faulted for not doing what might have saved two of their subordinates.
Firefighting is about sometimes taking extreme risks, and counting on a combination of training, skill and precautions to get the job done without loss of life. When the normally routine job of building inspections becomes risky, the answer is to take the necessary precautions, not to shirk the duty. That is the sad lesson to be taken while remembering the two valiant men who lost their lives.
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