September-October 2011

Ten years after Sept. 11 is a good time to revisit what that day's very costly lessons were and whether the New York City Fire Department has learned them. But the prospect of another Sept. 11 is as unlikely as it is terrifying. Fires in basements and factories and two-story homes, however, will happen all the time. So it's important to also learn the lessons taught by the 43 other FDNY fatalities that occurred in the decade before and the decade since the World Trade Center disaster. Since 2006, City Limits has been using the Freedom of Information Law to gather official FDNY reports on line-of-duty deaths from 1991 to the present. These documents and others, along with interviews with current and former FDNY personnel, fire experts and kin of the deceased, point to a set of factors that contributed to those deaths, and the many reports on Sept. 11 detail the lessons that disaster had to teach. FDNY reports and interviews with experts indicate whether the lessons from these many fatalities have led to meaningful change in New York City.