New York, NY – The FDNY’s highest-ranking officer recently told the City Council that had the department’s “five firefighter per engine staffing” been in effect during January’s Twin Parks high-rise fire — there would have been four additional firefighters on the scene of the blaze that killed 17 residents including eight children.
The admission by FDNY’s Acting Chief of Department John Hodgens was prompted by a line of questioning pursued by Council Member Joann Ariola (R-Queens), chair of the Council’s Fire and Emergency Management Committee at the April 6 hearing of the Council’s Twin Parks Citywide Taskforce on Fire Prevention.
On Jan. 6, the first FDNY engine unit was on the scene of the Bronx mass-casualty fire in 3:16 minutes with just four firefighters. A second unit responded close to the four minute mark, at which point the on-scene units had sufficient personnel to run the hose required to get water on a fire that “was advanced upon arrival with heavy smoke throughout the building,” according to Hodgens.
The smoky blaze in the 19-story publicly subsidized housing project in the Bronx ultimately required 200 firefighters and dozens of ambulances. Forty-five civilians were hospitalized. The high casualty rate was the result of the smoke conditions which overcame dozens of residents in the stairwells of the apartment building. The closely coordinated efforts of firefighters and EMS personnel resulted in 15 civilians, who were in cardiac arrest, making it alive to the hospital.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, it was the failure of two apartment doors to close automatically as required by the city Building Code that was faulted for the toxic plume of smoke that overcame those who rushed to exit the building, but were not able to make it out.
MORE HANDS HELP
“With your vast knowledge, your experience with the department, would having the fifth firefighter on an engine made firefighters able to get into that fire more quickly — and is it a preventative for the loss of lives,” Ariola asked Hodgens.
“Since 1990, we have been primarily responding with four firefighter engines and we have come up with procedures that, as you know, we team up the engine companies to get the first line in position as quickly as possible….obviously more hands are better,” Hodgens conceded.
It was under Mayor Bloomberg’s cost-cutting that the city moved away entirely from the more robust staffing. Then, during the de Blasio administration, the Uniformed Firefighters Association won a restoration of the fifth firefighter at 20 of the city’s busiest 197 engine companies. Yet, the FDNY retained the prerogative to drop those companies back to four if the percentage of firefighters out sick exceeds seven-percent.
A week before the Twin Parks fire, with the firefighters’ absence rate at 18-percent, in part due to COVID, the FDNY opted to return the five firefighter crews to four.
“Had this fire occurred on Jan. 2, the first engine that arrived would have had another pair of hands,” Andy Ansbro, president of the UFA, said immediately after the blaze. “I am not trying to point fingers. I am trying to say that over the last 50 years, every time that there’s a financial downturn, the FDNY gets defunded and loses staffing as well as firehouses. And when times are good, they never put it back.”
Uniformed Fire Officer Association Vice President George Farinacci testified to the Council that the gap between the arrival of the first engine on scene and the second unit required to run the hose line was critical.
“My question to you is how long is 43 seconds when you or your loved one are in a fire or breathing super-heated toxic gas —think about that a minute,” Farinacci said. “Getting water on the fire is the most critical component to fighting a fire. One of the simplest ways of facilitating getting water on the fire is getting the first hose line in place and operating with sufficient firefighters on the scene as soon as possible.”
FIRE NOT ALONE
The April 6 joint hearing included the City Council’s Committee on Fire and Emergency Management, Housings and Buildings as well as its Twin Parks Citywide Task Force on Fire Prevention. In addition to the fire unions making their case for more personnel, officials from DC 37 Local 2507, which represents EMTs, paramedics and fire prevention inspectors, told the panel they were seriously understaffed.
“EMS is so short staffed — it’s been an ongoing issue for decades,” Oren Barzilay, president of Local 2507 testified. “On a daily basis the Bronx is so overwhelmed that we have an entire station from Queens that gets relocated to the Bronx to assist them. On any given day, there are not enough units anywhere in the city. We are constantly pulling units and resources to other divisions to keep up with the call volume.”
According to Local 2507, FDNY Fire Prevention Inspectors had been scheduled to inspect the premises of the Twin Parks complex months before the blaze, but didn’t do so because 25 percent of their unit was detailed to do COVID-related work like checking that restaurants and bars were in compliance with the city’s pandemic’s regulation.
According to the union, the FDNY was authorized to hire over 600 Fire Prevention Inspectors but had 412 on the job.
“We have buildings that haven’t been inspected in five years,” said Barzilay. “Thousands of buildings, I am not talking about a few dozen—I am talking about thousands.”
An FDNY spokesperson confirmed that the department has 650 positions in the Bureau of Fire Prevention and that there were currently approximately 123 vacancies, but some of that number included civilian job titles.
Acting Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh disputed the union’s claim that FDNY Fire Prevention Inspectors being detailed to COVID compliance work had caused them to miss an inspection for the Twin Parks complex.
The fire and EMS unions’ concern about staffing levels comes at a time when Mayor Adams has asked most every city agency, including the FDNY to reduce their budget by 3 percent. At a March 8 budget hearing, Kavanagh testified her agency had found $75 million cuts over the two fiscal years which included eliminating half of its unfilled civilian civil service jobs.
Across city agencies, the Adams budget calls for eliminating 10,000 unfilled civil service positions.
