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CNN Live Today

New York's Mayor to Hold News Conference

Aired August 19, 2002 - 11:00   ET

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

LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Up first this hour on CNN: terror with the advantage of some hindsight. New York City's police and fire departments hailed as September heroes, but there were some problems on 9/11.
This hour, the mayor will reveal some big changes to come in the way the city deals with a future attack or a similar crisis.

CNN' Hillary Lane joins us now. She is standing by at City Hall in New York this morning.

Hello -- Hillary.

HILLARY LANE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning, Leon.

In my hand, I have a document in excess of 100 pages, which details what happened with the fire department's response on September 11. There is another document just as long for the police department.

The departments commissioned these reports from an outside consultant, which spent in excess of five months pouring over transcripts, radio tapes and interviews with individual respondents, trying to pull together a more complete picture of the attack.

We're waiting for the mayor to come and present this, along with the two chiefs of the department.

But what I can tell you about the report, incredibly in-depth, 50 pages alone dedicated to recommendations.

One of the big ones for the fire department is to expand on what is called the Incident Command System, which is used all over by emergency personnel, but which was not used enough on September 11; the same thing for the New York City Police Department.

Also, talking about communications systems, one of the key conclusions CNN has been told in this report is that if communications had been better, lives very well may have been saved. As you will recall, 343 firefighters alone were killed on September 11. That's 13 percent of the overall total.

One of the keys in this report, complete testing of UHF portable radios, something the department had started doing, but hadn't finished doing. And that is likely to be the case with a good deal of these recommendations. Some of them under way; some of them already pointed out by the internal reviews that both the fire department and the police department have conducted on their own. But now, with somebody outside looking in, structuring this, flow charts, management systems, how to better allocate resources in case of an emergency, these are points that are going to be studied very carefully. And according to the fire and police chiefs, begin -- their departments will begin implementing them almost immediately -- Leon.

HARRIS: All right, Hillary, we'll get back to you once that press conference gets under way. We expect that will be pretty much any minute now, so you stand by there at City Hall in New York.

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