Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Sheirer Shares Communications Lessons Learned on 9/11

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 01:13:11 -0500

By J. Sharpe Smith
Editor
Sheirer Shares Communications Lessons Learned on 9/11

Counters Criticism in Keynote Speech Debate

Recent reports that stated lives were lost because of failures in the communica-tions
system on 9/11 have found at least one person that will be hard to convince,
Richard J. Sheirer, who coordinated both the rescue and recovery efforts at the
World Trade Center. Speaking at the opening session of the Private Wireless
Summit, Sheirer, now Senior Vice President of Giuliani Partners, LLC, shared
many of the lessons he learned in emergency communications from coordinating
the emergency response to our nation’s largest terrorist event.

Sheirer said a Port Authority tape of radio transmissions in Tower Number Two
revealed the radio system worked as intended, and he characterized recent efforts to
examine problems with communications during the 9/11 crisis in New York as
wanting. In one study, commissioned by the Fire Department of New York,
McKinsey & Co., a management-consulting firm, was unfavorable concerning the
communications involved in the response.

In reference to what is now called the McKinsey Report, Sheirer said, “Having
Richard Sheirer serves as the keynote speaker for the Private Wireless Summit.
never been there, they don’t have a clue. They chose not
to speak to the Mayor [Giuliani], not to speak to me
about coordination and then presented their proscriptive
view on what went wrong.” Sheirer’s confidence in the
communications system is based, in part, on the fact that
the Port Authority installed repeaters and leaky coaxial
cable to improve communications coverage in both the
towers, in 1993, after the bombing of the World Trade
Center.

Sheirer was in City Hall, three blocks away when the
first airplane stuck and he saw the gaping hole and the
fire. He then rushed to the site to coordinate the emer-gency
response. “When I was in the lobby of Tower One,
there was a lot of communications –– a lot of congestion
as one would expect with the number of land mobile
radios there. I used the 800 MHz system, operated by the
Office of Emergency Management for interagency com-munications,
and it was working.” As the day progressed
and the towers collapsed, the state of the communications
grew hazy, however.

Sheirer says the Port Authority tape provides critical
information on what actually took place that morning
and he believes that human error and stress may have
played a bigger role in the communications problem in
Tower Number One rather than the failure of the radio
system. “It is just a gut instinct that I have, after 25 years
of working with public safety communications.” More
will be known when the fire department dispatch tapes,
which are currently being used as evidence in the trial of
an alleged terrorist, are released.

Port Authority Repeater Tape
Provides Evidence

Sheirer’s comments came as news was breaking about
communications in the World Trade Center towers on
9/11. “But when the Port Authority found the tape of
Tower Two repeater system, a clearer picture of commu-nication
emerged,” says Sheirer. “When they played that
tape, you heard that the communications system worked
as it was intended.”

Analysis of the tape transmissions “raises a com-manding
challenge to the city's official conclusion that a
certain piece of radio equipment — called a repeater —
was the cause of failures in fire communications,” accord-ing
to the New York Times. “The tape makes clear that
Jim Henry (right) discusses 9/11 with Sheirer.?17
DECEMBER 2002/JANUARY 2003
firefighters in the south tower [Tower Two], the first of
the two to collapse, were in fact able to use the repeater,
but not the firefighters in the north tower [Tower One].”
Sheirer described the various investigative reports as
simply a part of the blame game. “We will see how it plays
out. But I think if the communications system worked in
Tower Two, why wouldn’t it work in Tower One?”
Building Number Seven Goes Down
The emergency operations center, one of the most
technically advanced in the country, was situated on the
23rd floor of Building Number Seven of the World Trade
Center complex. When that building caught fire and later
collapsed, a temporary center was set up in the police
academy on the east side of New York. Sheirer and other
staff members were actually on the verge of going back
into Building Number Seven of the complex to inspect
the comm center when a whooshing sound announced
that it, too, had imploded, hours after the towers had col-lapsed.
Ultimately the comm center ended up on Pier 92,
which interestingly enough had been the site selected for
an emergency preparedness drill, scheduled for September
12th. Within 36 hours, a new emergency operations cen-ter
was built housing more than 100 agencies. This center
was occupied with between 300 to one thousand workers
24 hours a day from September 14th through February
2002, when it moved to its current headquarters in
Brooklyn.
“Therein is a lesson to be learned. You don’t put your
emergency operations center in a public building on the
23rd floor above a ConEd [power] substation. Having
run communications for 25 years, I would rather have a
hardened, secured and isolated location for a command
center,” says Sheirer.
The Importance of Being Prepared
September 11, 2001, began as a beautiful, bright fall
day with no hint of the terror that would rain from the
skies. Sheirer challenged the nation to change and be bet-ter
prepared for the unknown events that lie in the future.
Radio system interoperability will be a critical com-ponent
of the nation’s readiness for disasters. On 9/11, the
Office of Emergency Management had to coordinate the
activities of 130 different agencies. One answer to the
problem of coordinating agencies from multiple jurisdic-tions
–– such as New York, New Jersey and federal agen-cies
–– is to develop public/private partnerships using car-riers
such as Nextel Communications, according to
Sheirer
“Communications in public safety will expand and
become a hybrid. We will see a public/private partnership,
which will benefit everyone concerned and will grow to
make a robust communications system that we are going
to need like never before,” he said.
Another answer is to prepare in advance and remain
vigilant. As the head of the Office of Emergency
Management, Sheirer had been studying worst-case sce-narios
for years. He said that emergency preparedness was
a priority for Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“Mayor Giuliani was intense. He demanded that we
plan, that we prepare and that we practice for anything
that could happen in our city. Because of that, we were
able to meet what happened to us that day,” Sheirer said.
“We didn’t plan for two jets fully loaded with fuel to crash
into the World Trade Center. We didn’t plan for those
buildings to collapse the way they did. But we did plan to
evacuate a quarter of a million to a million people in the
event of a storm, for fires, for plane crashes, for bombings
and for biological warfare, among other events.” Sheirer
thanked the private wireless industry for its role in help-ing
New York respond to the crisis and engage in recovery
operations.
“The 343 firefighters, 23 New York police officers, 37
Port Authority Police Officers, six emergency medical
technicians and three retired firefighters who gave their
lives on 9/11 to save 25,000 citizens –– they are the
heroes,” he said. “The people who volunteered without
being asked, who came to the aid of our city, they are the
heroes. And those of you in this room, without whose
support and aid we would not have been able to recover
and respond the way we did, you are the heroes.”
Conclusion
As for the future, Sheirer warned that the nation is
losing its sense of urgency in the area of homeland securi-ty.
Both the public and private sectors of the nation need
to follow Giuliani’s example and prepare and practice for
the next terrorist event, he said.
“Complacency is not just walking back into the pic-ture.
It is galloping,” Sheirer said. “Organized terrorism
and the acts of their sympathizers … this is what we have
to face in the future. Some people say that the world has
changed. I say we have been brought into the world. We
thought we were insulated. Those two oceans gave us a
sense of security from what was going on in the rest of the
world.

“If there is one thing that we must do, no matter
what the profession, it is to keep our eye on the ball … be
prepared … plan, practice and execute. There is no doubt
in anyone’s minds that there is another day coming …
when we will have to use those skills. We were able to
respond to 9/11 because of our preparation and practice.
That holds true of those of us in government, but in the
private sector, too.”

http://www.ita-relay.com/magazine/dec02_jan03/Sheirer12-02.pdf

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/