BY BILL MANNING
Six weeks after the September 11 murders, the incessant talk of getting back to “business as usual” is beyond fantasy.
“Business as usual”?
Photos of firefighters at Ground Zero, helmets removed in silent prayer around the flag-draped remains of their brothers, still reach out to us occasionally from the newspapers-but now those images are placed in Section B, page 8.
The seemingly endless funerals and memorial services for FDNY firefighters are only about half complete.
Grief is intermingled with frustration and anger. At a four-alarm fire in New York on October 17, one firefighter said, “We’ve got a lot of sad people walking around who just don’t know what to do.” Another complained, “It’s a BS job dumping water. We ought to be at the WTC looking for the boys.”
Front-page headlines tell of the mounting anthrax crisis and public scare. The fire service is living it daily, up close and personal, in the cities and in the hinterlands. You don’t need official warnings from experts and politicians to know that the threat of bioterrorism, in addition to the more “traditional” and spectacular weapons of mass destruction, is very real and very serious.
Firefighters are on the front lines of these wartime domestic responses. That was excruciatingly evident on September 11. This is war on American soil, and the fire service is a large and critical component of our domestic army.
To send undertrained, underequipped, and underresourced soldiers abroad to deal with vicious practitioners of an unholy war against America would be unthinkable. But to do it to front-line firefighters here at home, Washington tells us, is perfectly acceptable. In the six weeks since 343 firefighters were sacrificed in bin Laden’s war, federal government representatives and officials have thought little and done less to train, equip, and protect the American firefighter for the inevitable. Their words to us are pretty and patronizing and empty. Washington has betrayed the fire service once again.
For years, our wonderful friend and true hero, Battalion Chief Ray Downey, warned all, including the shameless Washingtonians, about a mass terrorist strike and what it would mean to the local fire department, “It’s not a question of if, but when.” And it is so bitterly ironic that Ray was taken from us because America was not prepared. He was on the front lines.
Legislation in the late 1990s that halfheartedly sought to increase state and local first-response-to-terrorism capabilities through the cumbersome mechanics of the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice was a day late and a dollar short. The programs did more to secure the retirement accounts of Beltway Bandits than the preparedness of local firefighters.
In most cases, there is not enough political payback for Washington lawgivers to pay much attention to local firefighters. It matters not that the real response war is fought by the locals in the trenches in the first few hours of the incident. It matters not that Washington is incapable of marshaling a large-scale federal response in the critical first hours to everywhere in America. It’s not about what works or what’s right. Naked political opportunism means sleeping with the right people, and if that means living the lie that federal responses to local incidents are more than ostentatious body-bag operations, then so be it.
In the wake of the murders, the national fire service organizations outlined a comprehensive list of the criteria necessary for a federal strengthening of our domestic response army. Washington has taken a pass on it.
A Senate bill aimed at adding $600 million to the federal fire grant program for local fire departments quickly stalled, despite the fact that the $100 million available in the program for 2001 fell short of fire department grant requests by 3,000 percent.
The Office of Management and Budget has signed off on a supplemental bill that would provide the Federal Emergency Management Agency with $550 million to distribute to the states for emergency response to terrorism, but close sources tell Fire Engineering it’s an emergency management-based bill with very limited trickle-down prospects for local fire departments.
FEMA did manage to kill the position of Chief Operating Officer for the United States Fire Administration, filled with high honors by Chief Ken Burris, thus negating one of the key victories won by the Blue Ribbon Panel in 1999. We’re going backward instead of forward.
A national fire service leader about as close as you can get to the Washington scene tells me he doesn’t expect the fire service will get any additional money from the feds, no matter how much firefighter blood was shed at the World Trade Center. There is plenty of Washington capital, of course, to bail out various private industries without strings attached, among them an airline industry whose security failures are well-documented and still exist but whose radio and TV advertisements have increased a hundredfold.
Business as usual?
It can never again be “business as usual” for a fire service that has lost much and has so much on its plate but will continue to stand up to the Philistines with slingshots. This, to the utter disgrace of a political establishment that terrorizes firefighters with “business as usual” policies that inevitably will kill more firefighters. You are the disposable troops at home. They have said so, by word and deed.
Bill Manning
