Subject: [NEXTEL-1] No Deal On Emergency Response

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:30:35 -0500

No Deal On Emergency Response

By William Murphy
Staff Writer

February 17, 2004, 10:08 PM EST

An effort to get a written agreement on how police officers and
firefighters handle major emergencies apparently has collapsed, several
city and union sources said Tuesday.

Six weeks ago, top City Hall officials were saying that an agreement on
the long-delayed operations protocol was close to being finalized.

The failure to get the Fire and Police departments to work out a written
agreement on how to handle emergencies has in the past been written off
to the macho nature of the two services.

Now, the U.S. Department of Homeless Security requires localities to
have a protocol in place as a condition for getting anti-terrorist
funding.

The protocol is an Incident Command System that is in use in many other
cities but has faced resistance here from the Police Department, which
has often been accused of refusing to cede control of any incident to
what some police commanders view as a rival agency.

"They've got to work this out," one fire union official, asking not to
be identified, said yesterday. "People don't care who pulls them out of
a car wreck. They just want to be pulled out."

Paul Browne, a police spokesman, said yesterday that the "process" of
creating an Incident Command System was proceeding.

Browne said the department's representative on the panel had recently
been replaced.

Chief Thomas Purtell, the head of emergency response for the Police
Department, had been promoted to commander of all patrol units in the
Bronx and had been replaced by Chief Phil Pulaski, who is commander of
the Joint Terrorist Task force.

Still, more than two years after the terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center, the city has not been able to come up with an intergrated method
for dealing with major incidents.

The city is also searching for a new director of the Office of Emergency
Management to replace John Odermatt, who resigned late last year.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, police and firefighters have gotten into some
nasty disputes that could have imperiled not only themselves but also
the public.

In July 2003, police arrested a firefighter who got into a dispute with
police at a Queens restaurant while the firefighters were trying to
rescue a burglar from the chimney.

Two weeks later, police and fire divers got into a dispute as they tried
in vain to rescue a man from Newtown Creek.

Firefighters said a police diver recklessly threw a grappling hook into
the water and dislodged a fire diver's face mask, endangering his life.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/crime/nyc-fire0218,0,4326480.story?coll=nyc-topheadlines-left

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