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9/11 Commission Recommends Threat-Based Grants By Joe Fiorill WASHINGTON — The U.S. Homeland Security Department should consider only risks and vulnerabilities in giving grants to emergency-response agencies around the country, the federal commission created to study the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks said yesterday in its long-awaited report (see GSN, May 27). The recommendation comes amid continuing controversy over how to dole out funds for purchases of items ranging from radios to radiation detectors. The grants are currently distributed based on a formula that combines per-state minimums and other considerations, such as population density. With campaigning in full swing for November’s elections, new partisan rancor has stalled legislation to reform the system by giving greater weight to assessed threats. One such bill was to have gone before the full House of Representatives this week but never made it to the House floor (see GSN, May 11). “Homeland security assistance should be based strictly on an assessment of risks and vulnerabilities. Now, in 2004, Washington, D.C., and New York City are certainly at the top of any such list. … Federal homeland-security assistance should not remain a program for general revenue-sharing,” the commission wrote. It is unclear whether Homeland Security would be able to base its grant allocations strictly on threat assessments. Under the 2002 law that created the department, Homeland Security is required to produce and regularly update a national assessment of the terrorist threat, but experts say the first complete assessment could still be years away. In a related recommendation, the 9/11 commission said response agencies around the country should, as a condition of receiving Homeland Security funds, implement “incident command systems” such as that used in and around Washington to establish unified command in a disaster. The commission added that Congress should pass pending legislation that would expand the radio spectrum available for emergency-response agencies and that the federal government should fund such efforts. Communication, Command and Control Plagued New York ResponseThe commission cast communication and command-and-control shortcomings as the major problems in agencies’ response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Police, firefighters and employees of the Port Authority, which owned the World Trade towers, were hampered by a lack of radio-communication capacity and procedures, the commission said. In particular, it said, the towers’ concrete and steel floors blocked radio signals, and communication volume overwhelmed available channels. In addition, the panel wrote, “The 911 [emergency-switchboard] system was not equipped to handle the enormous volume of calls it received.” As a result of the communication problems, responders often lacked information that would have been useful in managing the attack consequences. New York Fire Department Chief Peter Hayden, a deputy chief at the time of the attacks, testified in May that “people watching on TV certainly had more knowledge of what was happening 100 floors above us than we did in the [north tower] lobby. … Without critical information coming in … it’s very difficult to make informed critical decisions.” The panel said all the New York agencies have worked hard to improve radio communication systems since the attacks. Command and control was another major problem in New York. The Port Authority Police Department lacked standard operating procedures for coordinating multiple commands in a major incident, while the Police Department (NYPD) and Fire Department (FDNY) were better prepared but still hampered by command-and-control confusion on Sept. 11, the panel said. Command and control posed problems both within and among the agencies. The city’s Emergency Management Office (OEM), part of the mayor’s office, was set up in 1996 to coordinate incident response among agencies but appears to have had little effect on the proceedings on Sept. 11. “The FDNY and NYPD each considered itself operationally autonomous. As of Sept. 11, they were not prepared to comprehensively coordinate their efforts in responding to a major incident. The OEM had not overcome this problem,” the commission wrote. The commission said the Police Department had “comparatively fewer” command-and-control difficulties than other agencies because it was accustomed to managing large events. The Fire Department, according to the panel, “has made a substantial effort in the past three years to address” the “significant shortcomings” in its command-and-control system. “It is less clear,” said the panel, “that the Port Authority has adopted new training exercises or major incident protocols to address these shortcomings.” Another problem in New York was a failure on the part of responders to imagine or predict events that lay ahead, the commission said. South tower authorities’ instructions to occupants after the north tower was hit, according to the report, made it clear that “the prospect of another plane hitting the second building was beyond the contemplation of anyone giving advice.” The instructions induced many workers to stay in place and others to return to their places of work after beginning to leave. Responders also uniformly failed to predict the eventual collapse of the towers from the airplane impacts and ensuing fires. “In the 17-minute period between 8:46 and 9:03 a.m. on Sept. 11, New York City and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had mobilized the largest rescue operation in the city’s history. Well over 1,000 first responders had been deployed, an evacuation had begun, and the critical decision that the fire could not be fought had been made. Then the second plane hit. … What had been the largest and most complicated rescue operation in city history instantly doubled in magnitude,” the commission wrote. “The emergency-response effort escalated with the crash of United 175 into the south tower. With that escalation, communications, as well as command and control, became increasingly critical and increasingly difficult. First responders assisted thousands of civilians in evacuating the towers even as incident commanders from responding agencies lacked knowledge of what other agencies and, in some cases, their own responders were doing,” the panel continued. A third attack in a separate New York City location, according to the report, might have been all the more devastating because of the large number of first responders present at the World Trade Center. “Though almost no one at 9:50 on Sept. 11 was contemplating an imminent total collapse of the twin towers,” the panel wrote, “many first responders and civilians were contemplating the possibility of imminent additional terrorist attacks throughout New York City. Had any such attacks occurred, the FDNY’s response would have been severely compromised by the concentration of so many of its off-duty personnel, particularly its elite personnel, at the WTC.” “Generally Effective” Pentagon Response Offers “Broader Lessons”The report indicates that although the New York attack was much larger in scale, “broader lessons in integrating multiagency response efforts are apparent when we analyze the response at the Pentagon,” because of the presence of federal agencies at the Defense Department headquarters and the facility’s location near the Virginia-Washington border. “The emergency response at the Pentagon represented a mix of local, state and federal jurisdictions and was generally effective. It overcame the inherent complications of a response across jurisdictions, because the Incident Command System, a formalized management structure for emergency response, was in place in the national capital region on 9/11,” the panel wrote. “While no emergency response is flawless,” wrote the commission, “the response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon was mainly a success, for three reasons: first, the strong professional relationships and trust established among emergency responders; second, the adoption of the Incident Command System; and third, the pursuit of a regional approach to response. Many fire and police agencies that responded had extensive prior experience working together on regional events and training exercises.” The Pentagon attack response, said the panel, was easier than the World Trade Center response because the former did not involve multiple impacts or surrounding buildings and did not take place 1,000 feet above ground. “Yet the Pentagon response encountered difficulties that echo those experienced in New York,” wrote the panel, including “significant problems with both self-dispatching and communications.” “It is a fair inference, given the differing situations in New York City and northern Virginia, that the problems in command, control and communications that occurred at both sites will likely recur in any emergency of similar scale. The task looking forward is to enable first responders to respond in a coordinated manner with the greatest possible awareness of the situation,” according to the report. “If New York and other major cities are to be prepared for future terrorist attacks,” the commission added, “different first-responder agencies within each city must be fully coordinated, just as different branches of the U.S. military are.”
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