Fire Dept. changes the way demolition is supervised
The Fire Department announced yesterday that it was changing the way it inspects buildings under construction or being torn down, to avoid the confusion that contributed to the deaths of two firefighters in a blaze at the former Deutsche Bank building at ground zero last summer.
Under city regulations, inspections at such buildings are required every 15 days. But when the city relieved three officers of their posts after the fire, commanders complained that following the inspection schedule was all but impossible because no one ever alerted them about which buildings were under construction or demolition in their area.
Yesterday, department officials said the city would now notify fire companies of permits issued for construction or demolition so they could easily determine which buildings to inspect, rather than having to find them by driving around the neighborhood.
The change is among several to emerge from a review of the department’s field inspection program after the fatal fire on Aug. 18 at the bank building, which was damaged in the 9/11 attack and was being dismantled at the time of the fire.
Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, who has called for greater compliance and accountability in the way the inspections are done, said he put the new rules into effect on Monday. Another change will create a computerized list of all buildings that are at least 75 feet tall that are under construction or demolition and supplement it with a computer pop-up program that reminds commanders of the due dates for inspections, and whether they are overdue.
Also, the number of hours that firefighters are given each week to carry out inspections will increase to nine from six. And layers of oversight will be built in, from the firehouse to the division to the borough to headquarters, Mr. Scoppetta said.
It was apparent to firefighters at Engine Company 10, in the local firehouse, that the Deutsche Bank building was being demolished, but inspections that could have uncovered some of its problems, including a broken standpipe and sealed stairwells, had not been done since November 2006.
Investigators are looking into these lapses. “All of this is all about firefighter safety and the public safety,” Mr. Scoppetta said, adding that more changes were likely.
The rules were immediately criticized by the union that represents 2,450 of the department’s superior officers, the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. Union officials said the changes would burden, rather than help, firefighters in the city’s engine and ladder companies and predicted that response times would increase, because firefighters would have to devote more time to inspections and need more time to get from them to fires, possibly leading to larger fires and more fatalities.
John J. McDonnell, the president of the union, said its leaders met with fire officials on Oct. 18 to put forward a plan calling for re-establishing citywide Fire Department task forces that would make inspections and keep the companies in their areas informed.
“The task forces could allow the regular field units to be available more and not be so responsible for complex inspections,” Mr. McDonnell said. “The task forces would bring back intimate information about the building that the fire units would not have the time to physically see themselves.”
Mr. Scoppetta, in rejecting the union’s arguments, said that only 50 percent of the allocated inspection time was being used for inspections, so the added time would not be burdensome. He said building inspections “never interfered with response times.” And he said that while special units could assist companies in some busy areas, regular firefighters must do most of their own inspections in order to become familiar with the buildings in case of fires there.
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