Leadership that Makes You Feel Safe

For instance, Barrett told us, Giuliani’s personal insistence that the city’s Emergency Operations Center be located in the World Trade Center’s Building 7 was “a disastrous decision with deadly consequences,” because once the building was damaged (it eventually collapsed), it “left no functioning command center” for emergency agencies to coordinate their work.

This decision was especially puzzling, said Barrett, because the World Trade Center (WTC) had already been the target of a 1993 terrorist attack. This was a key reason why top Giuliani officials, including his police chief and emergency management director, argued, against the mayor’s insistence, not to locate the headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
Ironically, the blunder that left the city without a unified command post and drove Giuliani into the city’s media-populated streets for a good part of the day was a major factor in cementing his image as the take-charge hero of September 11.

Failure of coordination

The loss of a fixed, unified command center was especially crucial, Barrett explained, because of other Giuliani administration failures: One, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), an agency founded by Giuliani in 1996 to deal with crises demanding multi-agency coordination, utterly failed to coordinate fire, police and other emergency agencies on the day of the attacks.

On September 11, according to the 9/11 Commission, Giuliani’s OEM was not able to “overcome” a situation in which the FDNY and NYPD considered themselves “operationally autonomous.” The failure of the administration to bridge differences in the two often contentious departments, said the Commission, meant “the city’s police and fire rescue workers were not fully prepared to coordinate their work when terrorists struck the World Trade Center.”
But when Giuliani testified before the 9/11 Commission, he told the panel:

Part of my job description was to coordinate and supervise emergencies. The agencies that were the primary responders were all agencies that worked for the mayor. We had a format for how we did it, and part of that included my being there, so that I could coordinate and make sure everybody was working together.


The command situation was further compromised by the city administration’s failure to provide the firefighters with radios that worked properly and could communicate with police radios. The inadequate fire department radios were no secret; they had been publicly discussed for years, especially after they failed to perform properly during the 1993 WTC attack, shortly before Giuliani came into office. The 9/11 Commission noted this fact, while Barrett and Collins named names, fingering the Giuliani administration’s negligence of the long-standing security issue.

The faulty radios were so critical in 2001 because information available to police could not be communicated to firefighters. According to Barrett, unnecessary deaths resulted when firefighters were not privy to police warnings, based on information from police helicopters, that the towers were in danger of partial collapse. Unaware, firefighters continued their efforts in the towers instead of immediately evacuating. Similarly uninformed, according to Barrett, 911 emergency telephone operators were telling people in the towers to stay put, well after police warnings of possible collapse had been issued.

A fatal decision

But problems with the command center, the radios and interagency coordination might have been mitigated, said Barrett, but for another faulty Giuliani management decision on the day of the attacks.

With his command center out of commission, Giuliani took to the streets with top police commanders. At one point the mayor’s entourage traveled to a nearby location on West Street, near the Hudson River shore, where fire department brass had set up a temporary command post.

So far, so good: With police and fire department commanders together in one place, interagency communications problems could be managed. If the police and fire department brass had remained together, either on West Street or at another location, the tragedy might have been mitigated because, with police and fire department radios in the same place, the latest information could be relayed between the two departments.

But Giuliani made the fatal decision to go to another location, taking police brass with him and splitting the command centers. This left no way to communicate the latest information to the firefighters, who, making up the majority of the rescuers, would perish in far greater numbers than workers from other emergency agencies.

When Extra! asked why Barrett thought Newsweek and other reporters resisted citing his work, he was quick to say, “It’s not important whether they cite us,” pointing out “there are official reports calling the Giuliani myth into question.”

In addition to the 9/11 Commission report, citing administration failures from the incompetent OEM to the faulty fire department radios to the unwise decision to separate police and fire department commanders, Barrett said, “there are at least two other official reports available to reporters and the public.”

Barrett pointed to the McKinsey Report (2002), commissioned by the New York Fire Department to review the department’s response to the 9/11 attacks, and to a 2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The McKinsey Report was the first official inquiry to criticize Giuliani’s placing the emergency operations center at the troubled site that would become known as Ground Zero, and the failure of police and fire department command coordination.

NIST found that the collapse of WTC 7 likely originated on the building’s fifth floor, where the distribution system for diesel fuel reservoirs was housed. At least one of the fuel reservoirs had been built into WTC 7 to run Giuliani’s emergency command center, over the objections of fire department officials.

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