World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

employees and closed, were within blocks of the World Trade Center. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, based in the top floor of World Trade Center Building 6, evacuated all its employees before that building collapsed. (11)

In the process, the DOH building was unexpectedly transformed into a “triage” area, as staff and civilians brought the injured into the lobby for medical treatment.

At the Pentagon, as in Manhattan, communications breakdowns were a big problem too. In fact, say experts, “lack of communications was the greatest weakness in this disaster.” (12)

Inside the Pentagon, communications couldn’t be transmitted out due to security; some of the District’s counties didn’t have compatible communications frequencies, with Arlington County— the incident commander—and all of Northern Virginia using 800 Megaherz and Maryland using something else, for example. A virus shut down computers in nearby Fairfax County. (13)

When cell phones didn’t work, “email was a bit of a savior for people,” says Richard Cole, supervisor at the Arlington County Department of Human Services’ Enviroiunental Health Bureau. “Unless you had two-way capability, cell phones were ineffective,” he adds. That made his job of trying to get staff coverage particularly challenging: “I spent a lot of hours trying to get people because we were so short-staffed,” he says.

Nevertheless, here, thanks to pre-planning, many of the agencies had preprogrammed Arlington County’s radio frequency in order to communication, and there was a limited supply of other compatible portables on hand to fill in the gaps for other law enforcement agencies in the region. (14)

At the Pentagon, in contrast with New York, the incident conunand system and the system designed for “all hazard consequence management” worked superbly, say experts. That was partly because the operation was under a single command. The Arlington County Fire Department. Emergency teams worked well together in part due to pre-established relationships, adequate resources and prior experience in emergencies, according to John Harrald, of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University. In Washington, some of the first responders were seasoned responders at the Oklahoma City bombing as well as a prior tragedy, an airlines crash at National Airport. (15)

By contrast with the Pentagon, New York’s response was one of huge “organizational complexity,” according to Harrald, who tracked a list of as many as 449 organizations responding to the emergency, including 159 from the public sector alone.

Even the last terrorist attack on the World Trade Center buildings had not prepared New York City for this event. In the last incident, which occurred on February 29, 1993, a bombing in the parking garage of the World Trade Center resulted in the deaths of five people and thousands of injuries. The bomb left a crater 200 by 100 feet wide and five stories deep. (16)

This time around. New York needed all the reinforcements it could get.

Among the more uniquely difficult challenges that responders have named: The sheer scope and scale of the incident, its cause, the number of hiunan lives taken, the environmental destruction, the physical devastation, the financial impact globally and locally, the concentrated geographic area, the involvement of multiple agencies, and the international scope of its ramification.

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