Mayor Says He’s ‘Satisfied’ With Fire Management

Mayor Bloomberg is “100% satisfied” with the management of New York’s firefighters, he told reporters yesterday, following the release of a fire department report on the deaths of two firefighters at the Deutsche Bank building in Lower Manhattan.“In terms of whether anyone was criminally negligent, the district attorney is looking at that,” he said. “We don’t do investigations of the conduct of our fire department or any other agency during that period at the request of the district attorney.”The fire department’s 176-page report said no individual factor caused the deaths of Robert Beddia, 53, and Joseph Graffagnino, 33, on August 18, 2007. Instead, it said a catalog of errors was responsible.Construction workers waited 13 minutes after discovering the fire, apparently started by a lit cigarette, before calling 911, the report said. This delay, along with a broken standpipe that further hampered firefighters, meant that it took around 80 minutes from the time the fire had started to when water first reached its flames.There were problems with the firefighters’ radio communications. A number of maydays were made before previous ones had been responded to, in violation of guidelines, which added to the confusion. The report also found that some firefighters’ walkie-talkies malfunctioned; it recommended that firefighters receive training in emergency radio communication.The Department of Buildings failed to carry out mandatory inspections on the site. “If other agencies who had inspectional authority had done the inspections,” the fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, said, “if the contractor who had inspectional authority had done the inspections, we would have fought that fire in a very different way and we would not have run into some of these extremely difficult situations, such as no water and blocked stairwells.”The site contractor, the John Galt Corporation, did not have a formal demolition permit to tear down the contaminated building, which was damaged on September 11, 2001. Instead, the Department of Buildings issued the contractor a number of alteration permits, which allowed it to deconstruct the building floor by floor.A spokesman for the Department of Buildings, Tony Sclafani, said: “The issuance of alteration permits had no bearing on the level of oversight by the department, which had a daily presence at the site during deconstruction operations.”The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is carrying out an investigation into the fire, has received a copy of the report. “We hope to finish within the next couple of months,” a spokeswoman for the office said.

Mayor Says He’s ‘Satisfied’ With Fire Management

Mayor Says He’s ‘Satisfied’ With Fire Management

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