Fire Department Reaches Scene of Blast Within Six Minutes of 911 Call

The phones started ringing moments after the blasts. About 3:30 a.m., the 911 operators received the first calls from residents in Midtown. The operators contacted the Police Department, the Fire Department, ambulances, and the city's Office of Emergency Management.

At 3:32 a.m., the Fire Department reported the 911 call, and six minutes later, the first engines arrived at the scene, according to a Fire Department spokesman, Tom Bubelnik.

For police officers, the trip to the crime scene was shorter. The 17th Precinct, which covers Midtown, is less than half a block from the British Consulate at 845 Third Ave., the office building between 51st and 52nd streets where a pair of makeshift grenades had exploded.

The devices detonated inside one of the building's 12 concrete flower planters, sending a foot-long chunk of concrete through the plate-glass entrance of the building.

Officers inside the precinct house heard the blasts and walked out onto Third Avenue to see what had happened. The officers found the crime scene desolate and reported no one was injured.

The spokesman for the city's Office of Emergency Management, Jarrod Bernstein, said he was roused from his bed a few minutes after 4 a.m. by a phone call from officials working in the agency's emergency response center.

After a briefing from the Police Department, Mr. Bernstein said, the damage reported from the blasts was not significant enough, nor the situation complicated enough, for his coordinating agency to begin implementing many of its most advanced procedures. There were no injuries reported, and no critical damage to the building.

When a second sweep by the Police Department's bomb squad yielded no additional explosive devices, Mr. Bernstein said the agency chose not to create a "situation room" and elected to leave the investigation into the explosions solely in the care of the Police Department.

"This situation quickly became a law enforcement matter, and you can't tell the Police Department how to do law enforcement," Mr. Bernstein said.

Calls to hospitals and other agencies, such as the offices of all the city's borough presidents, were made, Mr. Bernstein said.

At approximately 5 a.m., Mayor Bloomberg received a phone call from the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, who briefed him personally on the explosions, a spokesman for the mayor, Bob Lawson, said. Both officials met outside the British Consulate building at seven o'clock for an early-morning press conference.