Meet the New NYC Fire Commish, Salvatore Cassano

The day of the fire had its parallels with 9/11 as well. Two hundred and seventy-five firefighters charged into an empty building, and it took an hour to figure out that they were up there without any working water.

The department issued a 176-page report on the "operational response to the fire," but it did not explore any of the management issues, promising a future "departmental administrative investigation" and referring to the incident commander only as "Car 15." Gribbon says now that there's "no point in any administrative critique," promising that none will ever occur, just as no departmental review did after 9/11. Unwilling to examine its own high-rise firefighting strategies, the department is doomed to go on killing its own. Cassano, who spent days at the hospital and the site after the fire and even assumed the title of "incident commander," managing the response at one point, is at the heart of each of these decisions.

Cliff Nielsen

Bryan Smith/ZUMA Press/Newscom

Cassano: Alarms go off.

Details

WITH SPECIAL REPORTING BY TOM FEENEY JR.

Research assistance by Cat Contiguglia, Sara Gates, Scott Greenberg, Alana Horowitz, Bill Kline, Simon McCormack, and T.J. Raphael.

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Sam Casperson, one of the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, said after a year of studying the response that day: "The Fire Department errs on the side of putting too many people in harm's way than too few. They were going to flood the tower. They had no idea of incident management. The thumb doesn't know what the little finger was doing. They had no idea how many firefighters were there." A department has "to have a plan for major incidents," he concluded, "and they didn't have one." Tom Von Essen, the commissioner that day, told the Times in 2002: "I've been a firefighter since 1970, and have often stood on floors where we needed 10 people and had 30. There's a lack of control that's dangerous on an everyday basis to firefighters." The next time, said Von Essen then, "we need to be ready beforehand."

What everyone from Morgenthau's office to department insiders concedes is that it was pure luck that only Beddia and Graffagnino died at the Deutsche Bank fire, where a confluence of things gone wrong, before and during the incident, could have killed so many more.

Scoppetta and Cassano then battened down the hatches, just as they did after 9/11. It's a department that won't ask the vital questions because it already knows the damning answers. When Morgenthau's case against the Deutsche contractors goes to trial later this year, the department will go on trial, too, as documents filed by the defense make clear. They intend to defend their clients by pointing the finger at every false step the department took at the site, from inspections to response, contending that the FDNY commanding officer "ordered his men up to the smoke-filled 15th floor before confirming that the standpipe could deliver water."

The numbing fact is that, within yards of Ground Zero, every misstep that preceded the deaths of 343 firefighters in 2001 was repeated in 2007. While Sal Cassano was a chief and commander overseeing the WTC from 1993 through 1999, the department developed no fire plan for the target that the terrorists vowed to hit again. Even Bloomberg said at that 2007 press conference that the Deutsche Bank building was "unique" and unmistakably merited its own plan, and it wasn't just Richie Fuerch who failed to develop one. Nor was it just Sal Cassano.

Morgenthau nearly indicted the city and the FDNY once before—in the late '80s when Ed Koch was mayor and seven people died at Schomburg Plaza, a 35-story Harlem residential tower. In that case, the FDNY performed an inspection just six weeks before the fire, but it certified that the sprinkler system was working, when it had been dead for months. Unlike Bloomberg, Koch demanded a departmental inquiry and dumped his commissioner before the district attorney concluded his probe. "There was no question of widespread fault and negligence and the grand jury wanted to bring back indictments," Morgenthau said, issuing a report then, too. Both mayors announced reforms, starting with the inspection system.

So will the next mayor, until one finally gets a grip on a department seemingly accountable to no one, not even its dead brothers.

wbarrett@villagevoice.com