RADIO MYSTERY WILL ENDURE

Radio Mystery Will Endure  

The U.S. Supreme Court last week decided to uphold a lower-court ruling dismissing a lawsuit filed against Motorola for allegedly supplying defective radios to the Fire Department that played a role in the massive death toll on Sept. 11. In doing so on what amounted to economic grounds, it prevented a public inquiry into a case that, for once, really isn't about the money.

The lawsuit was filed by the survivors of some of the 343 FDNY members who perished at the World Trade Center during the rescue efforts nearly 4-1/2 years ago. They contended that Motorola and members of the Giuliani administration shared some responsibility for the deaths because the defective radios prevented firefighters working in the North Tower of the Trade Center from hearing an order from an FDNY commander to evacuate the building prior to its collapse.

The fact that the radios were being used more than eight years after they failed to function properly when firefighters responded to the February 1993 bombing in the Trade Center was connected to problems with a previous Motorola shipment.

In March 2001, two-way digital radios supplied by the company were removed from service by the FDNY after the "Mayday" cry of a Firefighter from a burning basement in Queens went unheard by members of his company. Top agency officials admitted that the radios, which had been put into use just a week earlier, had not been adequately field-tested.

According to the Uniformed Firefighters' Association, a peculiar aspect of the radios led to them being heard clearly in other boroughs but not necessarily in close proximity to the transmissions. It was subsequently revealed that the problems occurred when two firefighters tried to transmit simultaneously using the same frequency, in effect stepping on each other's messages.

There were suspicions about the manner in which the new system was implemented: what had started out as a $4.5-million "replacements" contract with Motorola had ballooned into a $33-million agreement to supply the new digital devices. Two weeks later, the controversy intensified when then-City Comptroller Alan Hevesi charged that the Fire Department had circumvented the normal contract process and accused it of "negligence" for rushing the radios into the field.

Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani retorted that Mr. Hevesi was making outlandish accusations in order to curry favor with the fire unions as he campaigned for Mayor. But there were indications from other quarters that improper pressure had been applied to the FDNY by the Giuliani administration to quickly accept the new radios.

One NYPD official told this newspaper that top police brass had lobbied technical staff to accept the same new digital system, but the pressure was outweighed by the department experts' conclusion that it was less reliable than their analog model. An NYPD spokesman denied that a conclusive decision was reached about the effectiveness of the new radios but acknowledged, "They didn't meet our [specifications]."

There was never any proof that the contract process was rigged to give Motorola a no-bid windfall from the sale of the digital radios to the FDNY. But the net effect was that the new radios were scrapped and the old ones from the company proved just as unreliable on Sept. 11 as they had more than eight years earlier at the Trade Center.

That's why it's easy to believe the parents of some of the firefighters who were killed when they insisted, following the Supreme Court's ruling, that the issue was not money. Rather, they were spurred by a determination to find out conclusively why the city was so intent on having Fire Department radios be supplied by a manufacturer that twice failed to provide what was needed.