Other Cities Race Ahead of New York on Fire Technology

Six years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, New York City is said to be lagging behind other cities in creating technology to aid firefighters to safely do their jobs.

Since the attacks, the city’s Fire Department has built a state-of-the-art command center in Brooklyn and is installing Global Positioning System units in fire trucks, but a lack of “pre-planning” is putting first-responders in danger, according to some department officials and outside experts.

“We have our technology priorities off-base,” Captain Peter Gormen, president of the Uniformed Fire Fighters Association, said. “We spend millions on GPS when we have more basic needs on dispatch.”

While fire departments in major cities across the country have integrated electronic database technologies that feed building plans and images to firefighting units before entering a blaze, New York’s fire department still uses a limited, character-based system to prepare first-responders.

In most cases, the only source of “pre-planning” information that first-responders receive before leaving the station is from the department’s Critical Information Dispatch System. The printouts, known as a CIDS cards, provide firefighters with structural information and known hazards inside the building.

The cards, which provide 160 characters of space, or about two lines on a computer screen, contain information that the fire department has collected at routine inspections and noted hazards encountered during previous fires.

“They actually have to truncate words so they can cram in critical information,” an associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Glenn Corbett, said. “It’s like the computer system your parents bought in 1973.”

Mr. Corbett said that while the department has developed state-of-the-art technologies to combat terrorism, it has been slow to act on pre-planning.

“They’ve been talking about if for years,” Mr. Corbett said. “They’re shooting for the stars when they should start with the moon.”

The format of the card hasn’t been updated since it was first implemented in 1980, a chief dispatcher and borough supervisor for the fire department in Staten Island, David Rosenzweig, said.

The fire department is making strides, however, to create technologies that would bolster CIDS cards, such as the development of electronic control boards that would assist battalion chiefs, the first officers at the scene of the fire, in organizing tactical plans, the chief of the New York City fire department, Salvatore Cassano, said.

The control boards, however, are still in a pilot phase and a date hasn’t been set for their implementation, fire department officials said.

In contrast, the Phoenix Fire Department has installed mobile computers inside each fire truck so firefighters can view detailed floor plans of a building before attacking the fire.

“We’ve found that we get into trouble when firefighters don’t know the building,” the project manager for the operations training center of the Phoenix Fire Department, Donald Abbot, said.

While the electronic command boards that New York City’s fire department is developing will display floor plans, the information will be in the hands of the battalion chief, who generally arrives at the scene of a blaze after the first firefighters. A retired deputy chief of the city’s fire department, Vincent Dunn, an advisor to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, said the fire department lacks a standardized pre-plan strategy.

“There should be a division of prevention that inspects buildings, draws diagrams, and digitizes them.” Mr. Dunn said. “Mapping a building is right out of the handbook.”

Large commercial buildings in Chicago are required to submit a detailed floor plan and a “life safety data sheet” to the fire department. The sheet includes population data within the building, such as the number of people who occupy each room and the location of handicapped individuals. This information is digitized and downloaded into a central database, which transmits the information to a high-tech communication van that is positioned at every fire.

“We’ve had 91% compliance from building owners,” Mr. Langford said.

New York’s fire department is currently working with the city’s Department of Buildings to create digitized blueprints of buildings, officials from both departments said. But the program is still in the data-gathering phase, and a date for completion hasn’t been set, a spokeswoman for the buildings department, Kate Lindquist, said

Some experts believe a lack of funding for the fire department, in addition to the size and scope of New York City, explains why preplanning hasn’t been tackled more efficiently.

“It’s easy for a small department to do it,” Mr. Dunn said. “But when you have 900,000 buildings to inspect, it’s a different story.”