By Carol Eisenberg
Newsday (New York)
Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced yesterday that the nation’s 35 highest-risk cities must have systems enabling first responders to communicate in a disaster by the end of next year. Every state must have such a system by the end of 2008, he said.
New York City has already achieved that goal, officials said, but will be expected to continue to improve communications with first responders in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester.
“The bottom line is we have to be able to communicate during a disaster,” Chertoff told more than 1,000 state and local homeland security officials assembled at the Washington Hilton yesterday. “We’re going to get it done.”
The lack of interoperable communications among first responders, and the poor functioning of fire radios in the World Trade Towers, were contributing causes in the scores of firefighters’ deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hampered communication also slowed rescue and recovery after Hurricane Katrina.
Chertoff announced those deadlines five weeks before the start of a new Congress controlled by Democrats, many of whom have expressed frustration about the slow pace of progress on first-responder communications and pledged tougher oversight of his department.
The secretary said public scorecards would be issued in the next few weeks to the highest-risk cities - including Boston, Houston and Chicago - to help them prioritize needed improvements. The focus, he said, would be regional because “threats are region-based.”
So the scorecard for New York City would assess communication not just among the city’s first responders, but also among police, fire and emergency management groups in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester.
The baseline goal is for incident command managers to be able to communicate with one another within one hour.
Local officials said they expect to do well in the ratings.
“Communications are vastly improved from what they were on Sept. 11,” said New York Deputy Fire Commissioner Frank Gribbon. “We have radios where we share frequencies. We have an NYPD videofeed to our operations center.”
Beyond hardware, Gribbon said the city has revamped protocols that set out who is in charge under what circumstances.
Chertoff also pledged yesterday that next year’s allocation of anti-terror grants would be more transparent. While continuing to allocate the lion’s share of money to high-risk areas, he said, decisions would be based more on “common sense” than on “bean counting.” This year’s grants, which included 40-percent funding cuts to New York City and Washington, D.C., were widely criticized.
Changes to the program, he said, would include an extended timeline that will enable municipalities to fine-tune their proposals after getting feedback.
Chertoff also said that a comprehensive alert system is being developed with the goal of reaching 85 percent of Americans within 10 minutes.
“Those of you who grew up in the ‘50s remember that they used to break into television programing ...,” he said. “But we’re in the 21st century. We have text messaging. We have the Internet. We have digital cable. We have satellite television. We have to upgrade the current patchwork system and build one that is national in scope for the 21st century.