There’s been talk for months, if not years, that the firefighters who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001, might have survived if Rudy Giuliani had responded to concerns about the FDNY’s radio equipment. Of all the former mayor’s many 9/11-related failures, this has always been near the top.
With this in mind, I found this latest six-minute clip from Brave New Films rather devastating.
If you’ve wondered why the FDNY has been livid with Giuliani for years, this settles the question quite nicely.
For those of you who can’t watch the clip, the video explains that Giuliani was told the firefighters didn’t have a functioning communications system after the original WTC attack in 1993, but for seven years, Giuliani ignored the problem. When he eventually ordered new radios, he gave Motorola a lucrative no-bid contract, and the company ended up providing untested radios that didn’t work.
On 9/11, when the order went out to the FDNY to evacuate, the firefighters never heard the order, which is why so many perished. (The NYPD, which had working radios, heard the order, vacated Ground Zero, and lost far fewer people when the towers fell.) Giuliani later said he believes the firefighters ignored the evacuation order on purpose — a claim that disgusts the department and the families of those who died.
As Digby put it:
This man is basing his entire candidacy on the fiction that he is a great “wartime” leader who can keep the country safe. But it’s clear that although he had eight years to do it, he couldn’t even provide necessary equipment for the first responders in NY. Why would anyone want him to lead the most powerful country on earth?
I often wonder the same thing.
Wayne Barrett, who helped in the production of the video clip, also tackled the radio issue in his devastating Village Voice piece.
In the end, firefighters had to rely exclusively on their radios, and the inability of the Giuliani administration to find a replacement for the radios that malfunctioned in 1993 left them unable to talk to each other, even about getting out of a tower on the verge of collapse.
The mayor had also done nothing to make the radios interoperable — which would have enabled the police and firefighters to communicate across departmental lines — despite having received a 1995 federal waiver granting the city the additional radio frequencies to make that possible. That meant the fire chiefs had no idea that police helicopters had anticipated the partial collapse of both towers long before they fell.
This evidence keeps piling up, and I have to at least hope that there will be a cumulative effect that eventually helps permeate the public’s understanding of Giuliani’s tragic 9/11 failures.