Passengers stranded aboard the Manhattan-bound Tramway on April 18-19 could have been on solid ground at least two hours earlier, according to an FDNY Battalion Chief who was on the scene. But in a perverse extension of the "turf war" between NYPD and FDNY, they were left hanging, and waiting, while an unusual solution was devised to bring them down.

Battalion Chief Don Hayde of the Roosevelt Island-based Special Operations Command (SOC) of the Fire Department said that incident commanders on the scene were made aware that an FDNY tower ladder was immediately available to remove the 21 passengers via an outward reach from the Queensboro Bridge. Hayde says it could have been done in five or six "reaches" in as little as 30 minutes. But the incident commander from the City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) took extra time to contract for a construction crane and "man basket" to remove the passengers, about half of whom waited until 4:30 a.m. to be removed.

Hayde was called to the Manhattan side once rescue basket procedures were under way on the Island side and passengers were being brought down from the Island-bound cabin. "I took a laser level to shoot a sighting," Hayde told The WIRE, "and saw that it was 80 feet from the bridge roadway to the gondola. It was well within the capability of a 95-foot tower ladder." Hayde says Battalion Chief Jack Mooney of Manhattan’s 8th Battalion told the OEM incident commander, "We can get it from here, from the roadway," but the advisory was ignored or dismissed while the man-basket solution was improvised.

"This incident took on a life of its own," Hayde said. At 53, he is a 29-year veteran of FDNY service; he’s seen a lot of incidents.

On both the Island and Manhattan sides, FDNY units were on the scene shortly after 5:00 p.m. but, at both locations, they were told they could leave – that the stoppage was routine and the cabins would soon be moving again. On the Manhattan side, they got that word from a RIOC employee. The WIRE has not been able to establish who, on the Roosevelt Island side, dismissed the firefighters from the scene. One firefighter who refused to comment further said only, "That’s a hot-potato issue right now." FDNY records show that April 18 was a busy day for the department and there were other demands on firefighting and rescue capability.

Police were on the scene, however, including Commissioner Ray Kelly and, with him, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who held a press conference on the Island, assuring reporters and television viewers that everything was under control.

FDNY personnel trained in Tramway rescue were not called back to the scene by the on-site emergency personnel. Instead, they learned of the continuing emergency from an Emergency Medical Services (EMS) captain who was watching TV. He advised them to get trained FDNY personnel to both ends of the Tramway. It was not until the second or third trip with the rescue basket, on the Roosevelt Island side, that firefighters became part of the rescue.

It also appears that, at a point when another two hours of work on the Tramway’s propulsion system would have ended the crisis as early as midnight, NYPD personnel on the scene took over, forbidding further work on first-choice cabin retrieval methods. An observer told The WIRE that an NYPD commander said, "We’re delaring this a rescue operation." According to Hayde, "There was a high level of frustration at the scene – that everything was taking so long."

Apparently, there has been no joint post-mortem on the incident to determine how the rescue could have been done more efficiently and more safely.

On the Manhattan side, the FDNY’s cherry-picker-like tower ladder was eventually brought into play, but only after delays. "Every time we wanted to do something based on the unified command procedure, my boss, Chief Pfeiffer, conferred with his police counterpart and representatives from OEM, but everything was an uphill battle, from getting permission to have the tower ladder come down, and then an hour-long delay to get permission to have it come to the bridge, and then another delay before getting the basket up to the gondola."

Hayde also said, "At an earlier point, a representative from OEM raised the question of using a tower ladder, and the police representative said, ‘We don’t have one,’" ignoring the fact that the FDNY does. It appears that exchange caused OEM personnel to start improvising the man-basket solution in which a crane was rented and moved in from a Manhattan construction site. As the crisis continued, NYPD had an overwhelmingly large contingent of personnel on the scene. "We were outnumbered," Hayde said. "It was like Little Big Horn."

Meanwhile, after the delays, the FDNY tower ladder was extended to a point level with the cabin doors, but personnel were instructed not to open the doors. "Not only did we get the basket flush," Hayde said, "but had we been allowed to open the cabin doors, we could have brought the basket several inches into the car. People could have stepped into the basket without ever having air below them."

Some Island residents currently involved in CERT (Certified Emergency Response Training) have suggested that the decision to improvise rescue methods demonstrates that the by-the-book Tramway rescue procedure falls short of a standard that could be achieved with better equipment and better planning. RIOC President Herb Berman has emphasized the ultimate safe removal of all the passengers, telling a City Council hearing last month that the proper focus was on safety over speed. He said, "the rescue procedures worked as they were designed to work." However, the man-basket method was never contemplated in the Tramway’s documented rescue procedure, and post-incident questions have been raised about the length of time required to mount and complete the rescue.

Hayde told The WIRE that most of the City personnel assigned to the Brooklyn OEM office are from NYPD, with only a small presence from FDNY. "If you go to the OEM office on Water Street in Brooklyn, it’s pretty much a police show," he said. The implication is that, in turf conflicts between the police and fire departments, OEM is likely to favor NYPD.

Hayde said that in most incidents involving both NYPD and FDNY, "everybody plays nice together in the sandbox." He said there are clear delineations of what department handles what kind of incident, or takes the lead. But when something unusual comes up and there might be a gray area – like the Tramway rescue – OEM calls the shots. Hayde said that for rescues not involving criminal activity, however, FDNY usually is given the lead role.

Hayde, who was on the Roosevelt Island side for a good part of the post-10 p.m. rescue work, said that there were opportunities to make the Island-side removal of passengers faster and safer. He said that NYPD personnel put a tall stepladder in place to remove passengers from the rescue basket once it had completed its descent. While this worked for able-bodied passengers, there were some children and elderly people involved and, for at least one elderly woman, FDNY Special Operations personnel rigged equipment to assist in her removal after pointing out dangers in the methods that were planned.

"We suggested to the police that we could use a tower ladder to remove passengers once the rescue basket was over the grassy area between the tower and the station," Hayde said. "They said their method was sufficient." Had a tower ladder been used, Hayde estimates a good deal of time could have been saved, both in travel of the rescue basket and by removal of groups of passengers rather than one-at-a-time descent via the stepladder.

Talking in general terms about New York City’s OEM system, Hayde said, "There’s a gross duplication of effort, manpower, and resources in the emergency services. More often than not, when we do have to work together, the incident goes OK – not to say that there aren’t a few ‘battles of the badges.’ John Q. Public knows the incident was taken care of," Hayde said, suggesting that for the average citizen, the conclusion of an incident without injury or death is the end of concern and interest, and citizens tend not to look beyond that. "John Q. Public doesn’t know it was done inefficiently, or that it could have been faster and safer."

The incident is the subject of a letter from a passenger in this issue.