Crises Show Lack of Planning
Emergencies Not Mike's Forte

By JIM CALLAGHAN  

The disaster at the Deutsche Bank building, with allegations of mob-controlled contractors and lack of oversight by the Governor and the Mayor, is eerily reminiscent of the Staten Island Ferry crash that killed 11 people on their way home from work in October 2003: Mayor Bloomberg has decided to blame the workers, not the bosses.

In making public spectacles of three fire chiefs by leaving the impression that they were responsible for the deaths of two Firefighters, Bloomberg replicated what he did with the ferry deaths.

Blaming the Absent

Then, he blamed two supervisors who were not even at work on the day of the crash. The investigation of supervisors breaking ferry rules stopped there, even though he and Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall used a ferry - with commuters on it - as a backdrop for a campaign commercial in June 2001. Bloomberg and the ferry boss walked right past a sign "Authorized Personnel Only" and the candidate took the wheel - in violation of Coast Guard and city rules.

LONGER ON STYLE THAN SUBSTANCE?: While Mayor Bloomberg has been portrayed as an elected official using the management practices of a CEO to run the city, his response to the recent flooding of the subway system and the failure to adequately monitor the Deutsche Bank building prior to the fire that killed two Firefighters raise questions about his effectiveness.

When the Top Supervisor arrived at the ferry scene - by helicopter - he immediately blamed the wind for the crash, yet inexplicably neither he nor Weinshall asked to see the man piloting the boat, who took off after he saw the carnage of dead bodies and sliced-off legs. The Mayor could have arrested him for leaving the scene of an accident but didn't.

But the larger issue with the fire was this: six years after 9/11, four years after the summer blackout of 2003 and after a similar rainstorm several years ago disrupted the subways, it is now clear to all New Yorkers that the Mayor has no plan - none - for any emergency - terrorism included - that might befall the city.

Deaths Avoidable

The fire deaths might have been prevented if Bloomberg implemented a suggestion made two years ago by a lowly reporter: namely that his technology experts figure out how to get Buildings Department violations - all of which are on line - to the firehouses across the city. If each firehouse had nothing more than a BlackBerry, the brave men who responded would have at least known of some of the perils that awaited them.

The fire came on the heels of another man-made disaster (not an act of God, as one of the Mayor's water-soaked Commissioners would have us believe).

Earlier in August, flooding in the subway system essentially closed down the metropolis (never mind that longtime subway riders can't even remember such occurrences except in the past few years).

As news spread, it seemed that everyone who had a car jumped in it. Bus trips in Queens that are scheduled for 20 minutes took two hours - just to get to the subway. Traffic was bumper to bumper, people were walking in the streets, there was little police presence at major intersections, and lanes for fire trucks or ambulances were impassable. A half-hour rainstorm had knocked out the city's entire subway system, leaving nearly every single commuter stranded, unable to get to work on time or unable to get to work at all.

Baseball Beats Chaos

While all this was happening, the Mayor was busy - hosting a giddy press conference with a baseball player named Tom Glavine, who was being honored by the Mayor for having pitched his 300th major league victory, a not-insignificant achievement. He gave the Mets pitcher the keys to the city, (not a scuba-diving outfit, which he would have needed if he was taking the subway home).

While everyone was yukking it up in the Blue Room, there was utter chaos outside the Mayor's windows on Broadway and Park Row and across the city.

It was bad enough that rain could do this to a subway system - the result of gross negligence on the part of the top bosses at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, led by Elliot Sander, an appointee of Governor Spitzer.

What was truly negligent was Bloomberg's response, which was to hold a press conference with a ballplayer while his sweaty, angry constituents were given wrong information - all day long - by the MTA.

The man who claims to run the city as a business - the CEO of eight million people - abdicated his responsibilities to clear the streets and to order his cops to untangle the traffic mess. Despite those ridiculous "terrorism exercises" we see every week, when 50 or so cop cars go speeding through the streets, sirens wailing, then park for an hour with two cops in each car doing nothing, Bloomberg has no plan to rescue us when the dirty bomb explodes or when the subways are filled, not with water, but with Sarin gas.

He didn't get on the phone to the MTA chief Sander and demand that every express bus on the road - more than 1,000 of them - run all day in and out of Manhattan instead of passing up riders on the streets and returning - empty - to their depots in The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, where they sat all day until they returned to Manhattan - empty - for the late-afternoon rush hour.

Didn't Put Ferries on OT 6

A CEO of a private company run like this - sending empty buses flying around town when you had hundreds of thousands of people waiting to ride - would be fired the next day. The Mayor had five huge Staten Island ferryboats at his disposal - each with a passenger load of 5,000 people, that could have carried 25,000 people an hour to downtown. Instead, he allowed his Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Kahn, to close down the rush hour promptly at 9 a.m., as if nothing more than a summer sunshower had dripped a soft mist on the city.

The Mayor had a fleet of 2,000 school buses owned by one private company available. Most of them are laid up for the summer. They are under contract with the city but they sat in the depots.

The Mayor could have been on the radio telling every city worker to stay home, since many of them didn't make it in anyway.

Since the last summer storm that closed down the subways, he could have ordered emergency repairs to the sewer system, which was partly responsible for the problem since it is clogged and old and not maintained properly.

He could have made sure that more city workers were hired to go out and clean every catch-basin in town; you know, the ones you see covered with newspapers and trash in every neighborhood. Bloomberg could have ordered his four appointees on the MTA board to demand an investigation as to what happened the last time a storm disrupted the subways. He could have told Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to make sure that every major road in the city had a clear lane for buses and that four-in-a-car HOV lanes were being imposed.

He did none of these things.

Bloomberg got on the TV news that day by calling one of his famous press conferences. He appeared in his shirtsleeves, surrounded by his B team of Commissioners, who looked befuddled and nervous. He called on each of them for a report and then heard from his bean counters about how much money the city was spending to fix pipes and repair roads.

Diverting Water Talk

The Mayor is very good at this, a master of the media, sort of like Rudy Giuliani on 9/11. He doesn't really do anything except to look like he is doing something, which, as we all know, is far more important than actually doing something. One of the people he called on to speak was his Water Commissioner; she is in charge of an agency that can't figure out - with computers - how to bill people properly. According to a New York Times article in 2006 by Anthony DePalma, the city is owed up to $630 million (a guess, just like the bills they send).

Also missing in action were the chief bean-counters from Wall Street and the big-business front groups disguised as civic organizations. For readers who remembered the daily drumbeat of how much the city's economy would be damaged in 2005 in the event of a transit strike, there was precious little whining from Bloomberg's pals about what this rainstorm had cost the city thanks to Spitzer, Bloomberg and their MTA board members.

Also missing from the discussion after the subway rain was the Bloomberg-Doctoroff NYC Plan for 2030, whereby the Mayor claims the city will have added one million residents and the subways will be overcrowded unless we do something now like charge people to drive around Manhattan - except, apparently, in bad weather. Maybe by then mayors and governors will be able to run a subway even when it rains, something the Tammany city fathers apparently didn't count on in the late 19th century when plans were being made to build the IRT. circle the wagons, close down the public files and obfuscate until reporters give up ; The downtown fire has showed us one characteristic of City Hall in a crisis or until the publishers - friends of the Mayor all - decide to distract us yet again with gossip, movie stars and sports figures on the front pages.

The Mayor's deputy, Dan Doctoroff, was on the board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation when it hired a mob-connected contractor, despite warnings from the Department of Investigation and an April 2006 Daily News article by Greg Smith.

The Buildings Department was on the scene regularly - doing what it does best: handing out tickets. DOI didn't alert the public, instead deciding to report quietly to the Mayor and his aides at Gracie Mansion. The Mayor continued to defend Bovis Lend Lease - the firm that built the headquarters of his company on Lexington Ave.

Scoppetta's Stonewall

Fire Commissioner Nick Scoppetta came up with a novel legal approach to handing over city documents. He said he couldn't because they were under subpoena - an utterly preposterous notion that has no basis in law). After refusing to hand over city documents that belong to all of us, not him, he gave interviews to the Times and News. In 1986, at the height of the scandals in the Koch administration, Deputy Mayor Stanley Brezenoff sent out a memo to all agency heads telling them simply that the FOIL laws were not suspended because of an investigation. He instructed them to comply with the laws by making copies of all documents under subpoena.

The Mayor's press aide "can't remember" what the Mayor was told at a crucial meeting cited by Charles Bagli and Willie Rashbaum in the Times. Can the Mayor remember? Will he tell us? A spokeswoman for DOI told the Times that agency officials would not let us in on a big secret: who they told in city government about the mob contractor. Will the Mayor tell us what he knew?

One thing we know about the Tammany boodle boys: when they built water mains and steam pipes, they lasted 100 years. While Boss Tweed hornswoggled the city, at least he gave us a magnificent courthouse that has lasted 130 years. It's so beautiful that the Mayor kicked out a planned museum and turned it over to his buddy Klein the Educator.

Even while it skimmed millions, the Tammany Tiger delivered the goods to the public and the city - because they were of the working class. They lived in a world where the products (bridges/trains/buildings/clean water and streets) were the media by which they were judged, not Fox Noise, or developers masquerading as publishers.

Crooked But Productive

Look around town and see what the Tammany crooks gave us - a completed subway finished in four years; the Catskill water system as well as bridges; health clinics, tunnels, parks, municipal pools for poor kids, hospitals and public housing for the workers. Then compare it to what the "reformers" in City Hall - especially the last three Mayors - have given us.

There is no record of the Tammany fixers blaming the wind for a ferry crash (see Missing Mike, October 2003) or global warming (see DEP boss Emily Lloyd) or the weatherman (see Sander) or an elusive God (Mayor Mike after the subway flood) for a colossal failure of leadership after it rained for a half-hour.

Mr. Callaghan, a staff writer for the New York Teacher, is a longtime bus, subway and ferry rider. The views expressed are his own, not his union's.