Out of 9/11 Tragedy Came Change for FDNY

By: Jarrett Murphy

As amazing as it seems now, there was resistance to investigating Sept. 11. Twenty-two House Republicans voted against authorizing a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). President George W. Bush resisted the creation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a.k.a. the 9/11 commission. Mayor Michael Bloomberg took no questions from the 9/11 commission when it came to New York to investigate the city’s response, and for a time he blocked the release of official records to the NIST investigators and the 9/11 commission, because the city was fighting an ultimately successful New York Timeslawsuit to make the records public.

Meanwhile, neither the FDNY’s Safety Battalion nor the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which routinely probe firefighter deaths, investigated the World Trade Center fatalities. “At the time, I just think because of the magnitude of the event, nothing was done,” says Tim Merinar, who leads NIOSH’s firefighter fatality investigations. “I don’t really think any organization did a true fatality investigation of the incident.” (In fairness, the scale of the losses would have made such investigations, which detail the precise circumstances of each death, difficult to complete.)

Despite these obstacles, three reports—the NIST study, the 9/11 commission investigation and an FDNY-authorized report by the consultant McKinsey & Co.—managed to, very delicately, spell out Sept. 11′s painful lessons for the city and its fire department.

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