Sept 11 Organizational Behavior

Case Description

Existing Institutional Flaws Prior to 9/11 - Prelude to Disaster

On September 11th, 2001 at 8:45 a.m. the city of New York was plagued with organizational challenges. One minute later, the world would begin to watch the New York Fire Department and New York Police Department organizationally unravel, leading to the demise of thousands of victims of terror including hundreds of members of their own teams. Many of these causes can be linked to a strong rivalry between these two groups, lack of synergized communications, incongruent incident management systems, and a deficiency in their terrorism response program.

Individually, the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) and the New York Police Department (NYPD) have a long history of effectively handling emergency situations. They each pride themselves on preparing for situations and acting professionally and safely when the emergencies present themselves.

However, the FDNY and the NYPD also have a history of poor interagency cooperation. Their rivalry and cultural bias against one another is legendary and stretches back generations. The agencies often show friction at emergency scenes. The poor cooperation starts at the highest levels as both agency commissioners have publicly stated an unwillingness to work with each other.

This poor cooperation even extends to the selection of communication equipment. On one hand, the FDNY uses 10-15 year old, outdated "analog" radios, and they are allocated six VHF frequencies used for department and emergency communications. The police department, on the other hand, has a modern and efficient communication system. The police radios are allocated their own set of unique frequencies, none of which are commonly shared with the other.

The FDNY also uses a unified incident management system (IMS) that is designed to organize and manage emergency situations. However, no other agency in New York City shares, nor is even equipped with one. Even though New York's Governor signed an executive order requiring every emergency agency in New York State to use the unified incident management system, the New York City police commissioner and fire commissioner stated publicly they would rather not share this system.

September 11, 2001 World Trade Center Terrorism Responses

Neither the FDNY nor the NYPD ever trained for a terrorist attack that reached the magnitude of damage caused by the planes hitting the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001. This disaster started a chain reaction that brought to light the institutional flaws which existed for years; these departments were ill-prepared to communicate with each other and with their own units in an extreme situation.

When the first terrorist plane hit the World Trade Center (WTC) North Tower at 8:46 a.m. on September 11th, the fire department quickly set up an operations center in the North Tower lobby to direct the activities of the fire fighters, and an incident command post was established across the street. Although senior police chiefs had arrived on the scene, none went to either FDNY command post.

When the second terrorist plane hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m., the crisis escalated. Instead of reporting to the operations center, many fire units headed directly into the towers. The Ground Zero fire commander had lost control of who was going into the buildings. The first responders were overwhelmed by both the magnitude of the crisis and their inability to manage the response. (Chart 1 shows the fire department companies that participated in the WTC emergency response.)

Chart 1: Fire department companies who participated in the emergency response

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20020707_wtc_UNITS/index_UNITS.html

The communication systems proved ineffective. Rescuers inside the towers failed to receive information from a police helicopter that saw the girders in the tower were glowing red and close to collapse. This information was not relayed to the FDNY because they did not share any communication frequencies, nor did they have a policy to share vital data. Furthermore, the fire department's radios were ineffective in communicating to fire fighters in the upper floors of the towers. Many firefighters in the towers never heard the evacuation orders that cost them their lives.

A repeater antenna system was installed in the World Trade Center complex after the 1993 terrorist bombing in the complex. This system was designed to amplify and rebroadcast FDNY radio signals. The system did not work on 9/11 which led to the fire command center having only intermittent contact with the firefighters in the towers.

The collapse of the South Tower at 9:59 a.m. demolished the incident command center across the street. This exasperated the communication problems. All firefighters were ordered to evacuate the North Tower but, a number of firefighters never heard that order. When the North Tower collapsed at 10:29 a.m. all incident command vanished. Radio frequencies were overwhelmed with mayday calls and command traffic rendering them useless.

Three hundred and forty-three firefighters and 23 police officers lost their lives on 9/11.

Issues

A lack of interagency cooperation and ineffective communications were key issues that led to the mismanagement of the 9/11 terrorist attack response by the FDNY and the NYPD. There were a number of symptoms that led to the development of these institutional flaws. (Exhibit 2 charts the FDNY, NYPD and the combined FDNY/NYPD interaction symptoms.)

* Organizational Culture - The rivalry between the FDNY and the NYPD is legendary and stretches back generations with the two agencies often showing friction at emergency situations. Both organizational cultures are very strong and outcome oriented. The beliefs and values of the organizations' founders were strongly held from the highest levels of each organization down to the newest recruits. The FDNY and NYPD were not going to change their organizational culture easily prior to 9/11.

* Interagency Operational Preparedness / Teamwork - The FDNY and the NYPD did not share a common goal of teamwork between the agencies. The two departments did not work together to plan and practice a specific response strategy to address terrorist actions.

* Planning and Management - The FDNY and