Word: giulianis
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...Giuliani dealt with major emergencies on a regular basis. He had time to prepare his city for a major calamity. But did he do all that he could? Much has been made of the fact that Giuliani's state-of-the-art emergency command center was rendered useless on the day of the attacks. The $13 million center was in the World Trade Center complex, on the 23rd floor of Building 7, which collapsed that day. When I asked Giuliani three years after 9/11 if it had been a mistake to place the command center in a known terrorist target...
...Giuliani's record on managing the city's emergency responders is more telling - and shows a more complicated leadership style than Americans saw on 9/11. "When we reflected on his tenure, we saw qualities that were not helpful," says Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 commission and former Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration. "[For President], I think you want someone who is not polarizing. Someone who brings people together by the power of persuasion rather than the power of dictate. Someone who is considering of other points of view and ultimately decisive. And on all three scores...
...Remember that 1994 subway firebombing? Despite what he said in public, Giuliani had profound concerns about the emergency response, according to Hauer, who became Giuliani's emergency-management chief in 1996. When Giuliani arrived that day, he couldn't figure out who was in charge. "Rudy walked down there and got one story from the police department, one from fire, one from EMS," says Hauer. "He was very frustrated...
...Getting police and fire departments to cooperate is hard anywhere. But New York City was worse than most places. "We had - and still have - a long history of competitive rivalry between the police and fire departments," says Joe Lhota, Giuliani's deputy mayor from 1998 to 2001. This kind of turf war is extremely dangerous. As we now know, the single biggest failing of intelligence agencies before 9/11 and response agencies after Hurricane Katrina was a lack of coordination and communication...
...credit, Giuliani tried to fix the problem. Giuliani established an Office of Emergency Management that reported directly to him. He put Hauer, an experienced emergency manager, in charge. But five years later, the problems persisted. On 9/11 the police and fire departments ran separate command centers, and communication was poor. The firefighters carried the same radios that had failed them in the 1993 bombing. At 10:04 a.m. on 9/11, after Tower Two had collapsed, a member of the New York Police Department's Aviation Unit warned that the top 15 floors of Tower One were "glowing red" and might...