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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- While their families and friends basked in the last few glorious days of summer on Staten Island, Wayne Baskin toiled in the Idaho wilderness, where temperatures reached the high 80s during the day before dropping to the low 30s at night, when he slept in a tent.
For two weeks, the Fire Department EMS captain from the Island's New Springville neighborhood and about 30 other firefighters from the FDNY's Incident Management Team helped battle a 217,000-acre wildfire that has been burning for two months. The team returned to New York Thursday night.
Around this same time two years ago, members of the Incident Management Team (IMT) lent support to the beleaguered residents of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Before that, they tackled wildfires in Arizona, Montana, Oregon, Texas, Washington and California.
Although they all volunteered for the duties, it's not just philanthropy that motivates the team to tackle disasters across the country: The FDNY is determined to learn how to manage complex catastrophes so they won't repeat the mistakes they made on Sept. 11.
"We were confused ... disorganized," said Baskin, referring to 9/11 during a phone interview from Idaho's Payette National Forest, where the fire had mostly been contained by Friday.
Like most of the other IMT members, Baskin experienced first-hand the chaos of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The McKinsey Report -- a five-month study commissioned by the city after the attacks -- concluded that although the FDNY helped rescue more than 25,000 people from the World Trade Center, their response was hampered by poor radio communications, a lack of coordination with police and often improper protocol within the command. One of the study's first recommendations to improve the FDNY's internal and operational capabilities in emergency situations was to create a specialized incident-management team to join the national Incident Command System (ICS).
The ICS, now part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, coordinates FDNY's emergency-response plans with those of other agencies at the city, state and federal levels. It grew from efforts in the 1970s to fight wildfires in California. After property damage ran into the millions, and many people died or were injured, a study similar to the McKinsey Report determined that response problems were often related to communication and management deficiencies rather than lack of resources or failure of tactics.
The FDNY began assembling the first IMT in 2003. The department made it clear to the hundreds of applicants that it wasn't going to be easy. To become federally certified, the team had to go through extensive classroom and field training from federal instructors, and had to be on call to travel across the country for hands-on training at major forest fire sites. They also had to learn new roles and a new command structure, and, because almost every fire department operates differently, the IMT almost had to learn the new language of the of the Incident Command System.
Not everyone who signed up stuck with the program.
"For some, being away from your family for two weeks at a time and sleeping in a tent is not their cup of tea," said Sean Johnson, the IMT's public information officer and a firefighter with Ladder Company 126 in Queens. "That's just part of the commitment you make."
Today there are about 130 IMT members in two groups. This recent trip to Idaho was the first time the entire IMT has been together as a certified "Type 2" team. Their goal is to become a certified "Type 1" team, which means FEMA deems it capable of responding to the largest-scale disasters.
"The idea is to continue to build our experience and understand our system under all types of conditions," Johnson said.
The firefighters applied their 9/11 experiences to their battle with the massive forest fire, but they also encountered unfamiliar challenges, said Oakwood resident Dan Nastro, a dispatcher for the IMT Field Command Unit.
"We had to get away from how we normally handle things in New York. We're used to going to a fire, putting it out and going home," Nastro said.
In Idaho, the team members provided logistical support, overseeing operations and coordinating supplies and firefighting efforts from a base about 30 miles from the blaze -- "To bring order to the chaos," said Brian Foley, a battalion chief from Huguenot.
For Foley and his other colleagues, however, every day of training could mean another life they will save when New York faces its next crisis.
"We're not going to prevent something from happening again. But we are going to be able to respond better, much more efficiently. And we'll never lose so many firefighters again," he said.
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