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Letters to the Editor: FDNY Busiest in 'War Years'

Letters to the Editor

FDNY Busiest in 'War Years'

To the Editor:

I am in receipt of a press release issued by the Uniformed Firefighter's Association, dated April 12. This press release quotes UFA President Steve Cassidy, in part, as follows:

"2005 was the busiest year in the history of the FDNY and now we are on pace to surpass the number of serious fires last year by more than 50 percent."

As many of us know, the so-called (and aptly named) "War Years" of the New York City Fire Department took place, generally, between the night Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 (resulting in the first use of "Command Post Procedure" and the initial requirement of just two engines and one truck company and a Chief to extinguish any fully-involved vacant buildings they were dispatched to), up to and including the so-called "Second Blackout" of 1977. It was certainly busy before and after those dates in selected areas, but the bulk of the workload falls in those years.

Between those two dates occurred a period of urban destruction, primarily by fire, of areas of the City of New York which has been described as equal to, if not worse than, the destruction of Berlin, Germany, during World War II.

I need not go into detail as to what an "average night" was like, as there are still a number of retired members of the department (and some still active) who are more than willing to tell anyone who is willing to listen. But, to give a reader some idea of how bad it was during those days, it was not uncommon to have at 6 p.m. a prearranged relocation of units from Manhattan and Queens - and sometimes even Brooklyn and Staten Island - to different quarters in The Bronx. Or they would be lined up in front of 60 Engine's quarters on East 143rd St., a number usually of about four engine companies and four ladder companies (sometimes quite a few more) in anticipation of a devastating night.

These pre-arranged relocators would be sent home to their own quarters before midnight exhausted themselves from the two or three "jobs" they were required to respond to throughout the borough, requiring yet another large number of companies relocated into The Bronx to replace them after midnight. On a citywide basis, there really were no "slow" companies, since they were called up to relocate where the work was at anytime.

Today, however, the president of the UFA has determined that all that didn't count ... if it ever happened at all. He has turned his eyes from the reality of the situation and instead has attempted to use the blood, sweat and tears of those members of the Fire Department of the 1970s as only a stepping stone for his own political benefit rather than an era of the department worthy of great respect.

This can only be described as a disgrace.

Anyone who was a Fireman or a Dispatcher - or even a department Mechanic or Communications Lineman - should be disgusted with the type of "political hype" that is being foisted on the mainstream media by the UFA by calling the year 2005 "the busiest year in the history of the FDNY ..." As the New York Post correctly pointed out when the 2005 numbers were released, the workload - actual "building fire" workload - of today's FDNY is less than half of what it was in 1976.

Steve Cassidy has decided to equate defective smoke detector and defective carbon monoxide detector runs, EMS runs, as well as defective "Class 3" alarms, on the same level as forty runs and three or four jobs in one night tour ("All Hands" or better) by individual companies in local neighborhoods. As many readers will agree, I am not talking about "40 runs and three jobs" over a whole borough, but what individual companies did in their respective neighborhoods, multiplied by the number of "busy" neighborhoods in a borough at that time.

It should be noted, by the way, that so-called EMS runs are not new to the FDNY; all one had to do was pull a fire alarm box for the numerous stabbings and shooting and drug overdoses which occurred, which usually resulted in an "aided case" being transported on the hose bed of an engine company).

All this, I will remind everyone, was on top of the layoff of a large number of the firefighting manpower. Sadly, I have not heard anyone inside the UFA take Cassidy to task for these "statistics." This is even more of a surprise, since there are members of the UFA's executive board (as well as the UFOA's board) who know full-well - and firsthand - what I am talking about.

Based on the UFA's press release, I can only assume that the UFA is in deep negotiations with the city to re-implement the much-needed (in those days) "Interchange Program," which allowed very busy units to relocate to less-busy units the next night (or, sometimes, in the middle of a very busy night tour) to acquire much-needed rest.

For this reason, I would remind the UFA leaders that there was, indeed, an FDNY prior to their appointment to the job whose members should not be forgotten, whose operations should be researched and studied, and whose workload will not - and quite possibly cannot - ever be duplicated in our lifetimes. Most certainly it should not be dismissed out-of-hand for political purposes.

JAMES FAY, Bronx Fire Dispatcher 1969-1978