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CNN Live Today

New York Releases Report on Response to 9/11 Attacks

Aired August 19, 2002 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: We begin this hour with lessons learned in the chaos and horror of September 11. As you may have seen live here in the last hour, New York's mayor released the results of a five-month study of that city's first responders.
CNN's Hillary Lane tells us all about it -- hi, Hillary.

HILLARY LANE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol. We just got this report just a few minutes ago, and the report about the fire department more than 100 pages long. The report about the police department just a bit shorter than that. But what I can tell you is that they are full of conclusions, and they are full of recommendations. Let me tell you first what police chief Ray Kelly had to say.

The police chief was outlining some of the major problems that had happened, and also saying how they went through the procedure of this analysis. This was an outside, independent analysis. The police department and fire department had conducted their own already. The police department looked at computer files, looked at dispatch records, listened to communications tapes. Came through with a number of recommendations.

Let me run through some of these. There needs to be improvement in operational command. There needs to be improvement in communications. In the deployment of personnel, the deployment of equipment, more new equipment needs to be purchased. There needs to be better training and expansion of the intelligence squad, training of new personnel coming in for terrorist attacks, for any sort of biological, chemical weapons attacks as well.

These are just some of the recommendations, and there have been independent working groups established to follow up on each of these major, major issues. The fire department, 343 firefighters lost on September 11. Quite a bit of that, this report finds, was due to lapses in communication, very possibly people did not hear the evacuation order.

So quite a bit of work has to be done at the fire department, and one of the recommendations made is that the fire department consider using the police department's type of radio equipment. That is something that is already being worked on at this point. So coming out of this major, major study that took five months to complete, are a number of recommendations and a number of conclusions.

One of the other big conclusions is that this was the most successful evacuation effort in urban history. They say saved 25,000 lives. Although many, many lives were lost, it was a really tremendous effort on all of the personnel involved, so this was not an exercise in finger-pointing. It really is an exercise in preparedness. I had mentioned to you that we would hear from Ray Kelly, the New York City police chief. Let me roll that for you now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAYMOND KELLY, COMMISSIONER, NYPD: Too many police personnel, especially among the executive corps responded to the scene. There was a lack of clarity about command structure and roles. While the police radio system worked well, a lack of discipline in radio protocol caused some problems. There was inadequate personal protection equipment for many police officers. There was insufficient counterterrorism training, and there was a need for comprehensive and realistic terrorism response plans.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LANE: So if you listen to that, you see that there are a number of goals that need to be met, both for the departments here and New York City's mayor Michael Bloomberg, stressing that work is already underway, this was begun immediately, and many of these points being addressed, working groups being set up to handle this so that New York can be prepared, God forbid something like this -- of this scale, or an even greater scale where ever to happen -- Carol.

LIN: You bet. All right. Thank you very much. Hillary Lane reporting live from New York.

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