By Peter N. Spencer
Staten Island Advance
STATEN ISLAND, NY — On a particularly frigid evening this January, Engine Co. 161 responded to a smoke alarm at Diane Palladino’s South Beach home, just in time to warn the family of a faulty furnace that was poised to explode.
The firefighters likely recognized the house: In the early morning hours last summer, they evacuated Ms. Palladino and her three children after an oak tree severed power lines and landed on the electric mast on their roof, surging live voltage through the entire building.
Engine 161 won’t be around the next time Ms. Palladino — a longtime Advance reporter who uses her maiden name in her byline — needs a late-night savior, if a plan to save millions of dollars is approved by city legislators. The Fire Department will close four engine companies in the city during the 15-hour night shift, including the South Beach unit.
And that won’t be the end of the cuts to the FDNY. With the city economy deteriorating to a point very few of us have seen before, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said closing firehouses could be the next step.
FDNY officials said they pored over data for weeks to ensure the closings would not affect public safety, but they declined to give the Advance that data. They also maintain the cuts were distributed equally in all five boroughs — engine companies in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan also will close during night hours, and another on Governors Island will be shuttered altogether.
But critics of the move say no matter how the city spins it, closing firehouses will put lives in jeopardy. And though the FDNY is spreading around the pain of budget cuts this time, that has not always been the case.
A disturbing trend
Although the number of fires has grown and the population has boomed in the borough over the last three decades, there are fewer firefighters detailed to Staten Island today than there were in 1975, an Advance analysis found. In fact, as the borough grew by 40 percent — by far the biggest growth rate of any borough in the city, from about 340,000 to 480,000 residents during that period — the number of fire personnel shrank by about 5 percent, from 184 to 175.
To put the Island’s firefighter headcount in perspective: There is one firefighter for every 2,742 borough residents. Citywide, there is about one firefighter for every 715 residents. Even if one assumes that 10 percent of FDNY personnel are in management or support and never respond to fire scenes, there are still less than a third as many firefighters per resident on the Island than anywhere else in the city. Altogether, there are 11,600 firefighters in the FDNY.
Fire officials did not respond to a written request for that data by Councilman James Oddo (R-Mid-Island/Brooklyn), who represents the communities served by Engine 161.
The short shrift is not limited to firefighters. An average FDNY Battalion Chief manages four to six companies. The three Island battalion chiefs — heads of the 21st on the North Shore, the 22nd on the Mid-Island and the 23rd on the South Shore — handle 10, 11 and 11 companies each, respectively.
Fire experts disagree as to whether there should be a standard ratio of firefighters to residents. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) emphasizes the number of firefighters to equipment — they suggest a minimum of four — and average response times as yardsticks of safety. A fire unit should be able to respond to a blaze within six minutes, according to NFPA standards.
The average response time to a structural fire on Staten Island last year was 4 minutes and 45 seconds, well within that safe range, according to FDNY statistics.
But the department’s EMS response times in the borough averaged 6 minutes and 33 seconds, the second-slowest average response times of the five boroughs, slightly better than Queens. Department officials say those figures are due, in large part, to the Island’s unique geographic challenges — 59 square miles of eclectic landscapes surrounded by water, split in half by a major highway, with varying densities, from high-rise developments to sprawling suburbs.
Fire Department spokesman Francis Gribbon said response times at night are much better because there is less traffic and less activity than during busier day shifts. The department’s plan once Engine 161 is shut down during evenings is to provide coverage from companies closest to the South Beach communities. Engine Co. 160 in Concord and Engine Co. 152 in Rosebank, which are about a mile and a half away, will cover the northern area, and Engine Co. 159 in Dongan Hills, which is about five and a half miles away, will provide coverage to the south.
A ‘plan for disaster’
Don Ruland, a Staten Island Uniformed Firefighters Association trustee, believes that’s a plan for disaster. According to department data, he said, a secondary responding unit takes, on average, one minute longer than a primary responding unit to get to the scene of a fire. An incipient structural fire, if properly fueled, can quadruple in intensity during that time, according to studies by the NFPA. That means fires that Engine 161 usually responds to during the night shift could be four times as intense by the time the stand-in units arrive — and twice as deadly.
Statistics seem to support Ruland’s claim: About two-thirds of all civilian deaths occur during the overnight shifts — from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m., FDNY department figures show.
In fact, all four fire deaths on the Island this year occurred in the evening or early-morning hours. Three other prominent fire deaths — that of Lt. John Martinson of Eltingville, who died fighting a Brooklyn fire in January, 9-year-old Tommy Monahan, who died in a fire at his Prince’s Bay home a year ago and Lt. Robert Ryan, who perished last month — also occurred during the night shift.
“I think the very concept of saying that life is worth more at one particular time of day than another is flawed and dangerous,” Ruland said.
Gribbon noted that the unusually high number of deaths during the overnight shift could likely be due to the longer hours (15, as opposed to the nine-hour day shift).
But Ruland explained the higher number of deaths as due to people sleeping while fires spread, which means they call a lot later. That would makes response times during these fires are even more crucial, he added.
Ruland also said daytime shifts suffer from an insufficient number of firefighters. About one-third of the Island’s firefighters are needed to respond to an “all-hands” fire, leaving the borough dangerously vulnerable, Ruland said. And that is also why fire companies from Brooklyn or Manhattan have to rush over the bridges to provide extra coverage here.
The debate over FDNY resources will continue in City Hall as the budget cuts make their way this week through negotiations between the mayor and City Council. Oddo and several other Council members have said they would rather find the money elsewhere, and keep engine companies like 161 open 24 hours. But even if they do, it will be a real challenge to keep any others from being shuttered, given the more than $150 million the mayor asked the FDNY to trim through the next fiscal year.
“This is not a luxury for Staten Islanders. These are budget cuts that will affect their lives,” Ruland said.