birth of oem: a 9/11 story

“A Sanitation Department salt spreader crashes through a wall and dangles three stories above the street, a Parks Department garbage truck falls into the East River, a crane falls onto Con Edison power lines, a boom truck falls onto a house, an earthquake shakes us, a hurricane strikes, and a tornado touches down in Queens. To some in our business this would be a lifetime of experiences. But for us this was just the last two weeks of August.”

— New York City OEM Deputy Commissioner John Scrivani’s farewell email to OEM, September 2011

birth of oem

Born and raised in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani defeated Democrat David Dinkins to become the first Republican mayor of New York City in thirty years. At the time, the city was reeling from a spike in crime and unemployment from a recent nationwide recession. Giuliani had promised New Yorkers that he would eradicate “the street tax paid to drunks and panhandlers…the squeegee men shaking down the motorist waiting at a light…the trash storms, the swirling mass of garbage left by peddlers and panhandlers, the open-air drug bazaars on unclean streets.” 

After his inauguration in January 1994, Giuliani took the reins of an enormous government bureaucracy, bigger even than that of most US states. Headquartered at City Hall in Lower Manhattan, New York City government was organized around a “strong mayor” system. Its more than three hundred thousand city workers were responsible for all city services and for enforcing all city laws. That centralized structure suited Giuliani perfectly, because as mayor, he was the boss of dozens of powerful city agencies, including fire, police, health and human services, housing, sanitation, buildings, water, and wastewater. 

Giuliani brought a completely new approach to City Hall. He did not come up through the local political clubs and so did not owe a huge burden of favors. He was an outsider—a tough former federal prosecutor with an intuitive grasp of the laws of power and how to use them. First and foremost, he knew that without accountability, nothing got done. He quickly gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the machinery of his government. He knew who was responsible for what, several layers down the New York City organizational chart. Giuliani and his lieutenants would reach deep into any agency at any time to get what they needed.

From the earliest days of his administration, Giuliani was frustrated with turf wars on the street between the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the New York City Fire Department (FDNY). The battle between Big Blue and Big Red had begun in the 1980s and escalated throughout the decade and into the 1990s. To tackle the longstanding rivalry, he needed to project his authority into the field, but he couldn’t always be everywhere. Giuliani needed an extension of himself, someone who could bring the boss to the street. 

Two years into his first term, he heard about a small unit buried in the Police Department that oversaw something called emergency management. He plucked it out of the NYPD and brought it to City Hall. He renamed it the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and hired a former IBM crisis manager named Jerome Hauer to run it. Hauer reported directly to the mayor and quickly became an integral part of his inner circle of advisers. The Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, or OEM, began with a staff of just twelve. They were an elite group of seasoned veterans from the city’s top agencies. One of the group’s first tasks was to improve the coordination between FDNY and NYPD by specifying which agency had authority over what emergencies. 

OEM came with a communications center called Watch Command. Watch Command’s job was to look and listen, around the clock and around the world, for any sign of approaching danger. Watch Command got information from communications channels such as emergency radios, alert systems, breaking news, live video feeds from New York Harbor and the city’s streets, and other watch centers around the state and the nation. 

While Watch Command was Giuliani’s eyes and ears on the world, OEM was his eyes and ears on the street. Hauer and his team, with an assortment of cellphones and pagers clipped to their belts, became fixtures at field emergencies, such as helicopter crashes, subway fires, building collapses, and water main breaks. At the same time, it worked its way into a leadership role in the city’s response to major incidents, like the West Nile virus outbreak and Y2K. When it showed up at a job, either on the street or at City Hall, OEM walked up like a boss.

OEM had what the old-timers called “juice.” They knew the rules and the players in the agencies who could turn the gears in the vast machinery of New York City government. They would call these players at all hours of the day or night with an “ask.” An ask is a favor or an unusual request; it included things such as a front-end loader to move a fallen tree or a structural engineer to assess the integrity of a building wall, usually urgently needed in the middle of a cold winter’s night. Everybody knew that an ask from Jerry Hauer was pretty much the same thing as an order from the mayor. The logic was simple: you could say no to Hauer, but Hauer was just going to call Joe Lhota , Guiliani’s deputy mayor for operations. The next call you would get would be from your boss after he or she had got a call from Lhota. Better to skip those last couple of steps and just do the ask. 

Throughout his eight years in office, Giuliani pursued an aggressive agenda focused on crime control and urban reconstruction. His relentless focus on accountability worked. He was credited not only with cleaning up city streets but with improving the overall quality of life in New York City.

In the fall of 2001, with Giuliani’s second term in office coming to a close, the vast machinery of city government was running mostly on autopilot. When the sun rose on a crisp fall Tuesday in September, most of his senior lieutenants were working on their next career moves. But before that morning was over, everything would change. 

9/11

OEM had a new director on September 11, 2001. Hauer had left the year before and had been replaced by Richie Sheirer. Sheirer had begun his career as an FDNY dispatcher and worked his way up through the ranks. After he took over the top job at OEM, he grew it to more than seventy full-time staff.

OEM had a new headquarters, too. Two years earlier, OEM staff, along with a state-of-the-art EOC, had moved to the 23rd floor of World Trade Center 7, just across the street from the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex. At nearly 1,400 feet, the North Tower was the tallest building in the world. 

At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, five hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the northern face of the North Tower. After burning for an hour and forty minutes, the North Tower collapsed. Massive pieces of steel and concrete rained down onto World Trade Center 7, piercing its exterior and igniting fires on at least ten floors. 

By then most of the OEM staff was out of the building. They were on the street, supporting the response at the FDNY command post or moving equipment into place. All were caught in the avalanche of dust and debris from the collapsing towers; some barely escaped with their lives. 

An hour later, as the building burned “like a giant torch,” FDNY abandoned its last efforts to save it. Heat from the fire expanded the girders in its steel floor, causing the beams to buckle and pull away from the structural columns. The east penthouse began to crumble in the late afternoon. The remainder gave way, and World Trade Center 7 collapsed completely at 5:21 p.m., hurling its iron columns into the ground like red-hot spears.

Watch Command relocated to OEM’s mobile command bus and kept working throughout that long day. But the loss of the EOC meant that OEM, and the city, was without its brain. Late in the afternoon, OEM created a temporary EOC at the Police Academy on East 20th Street in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan. From there, a traumatized OEM spent the remainder of the day and that night pulling itself together. 

Many in New York wondered whether the sun would rise again on Wednesday morning. As it finally did, OEM and its government, voluntary agency and private sector partners gathered in the makeshift EOC in the second-floor library of the Police Academy. The Port Authority reported that 15,000 people were in the towers when they collapsed. The conflicting images, of so many lost and yet so many potentially still alive, created an agonizing sense of urgency. There is nothing that anybody in the room would not have done to save even one life. They settled for doing the only thing that they knew how to do: They went to work.

OEM Deputy Director Henry Jackson went looking for a replacement site for his EOC, and quickly settled on the New York Passenger Ship Terminal on West 53rd Street. Built in 1935 for luxury ocean liners, Pier 92 jutted out 1,100 feet into the Hudson River. Jackson was familiar with the site, because it had been scheduled to host OEM’s bioterrorism exercise (dubbed Operation TriPOD) the next day after the attack, on September 12. Although not ideal, the space was big enough, easily accessible to the World Trade Center site, and available. 

In one of the most extraordinary technology deployments in history, Jackson and his team converted the space into a fully operational EOC in less than seventy-two hours. On September 14, the massive room, with over 75,000 square feet of space and twenty-six-foot-high ceilings, burst into life. Dozens of federal, city, state, and local agencies, over 150 in all, came together there to confront the crisis, and New York’s first “Great Machine” was born. As it surged to address all the issues New York City was facing, OEM was transformed from a tactical team focused on street-level emergencies to an elite team of professionals who could handle any type and size of crisis. 

the eoc gets really busy

The New York City EOC was the epicenter of the crisis. In those early days, the cavernous warehouse was so busy and so loud that you could hardly hear yourself think. And the busiest room on the planet was about to get a lot busier.

On the Tuesday after the attacks, five letters were dropped into a mailbox at Ten Nassau Street in Princeton, New Jersey, just across the street from the Princeton University campus. The envelopes were addressed to ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and the New York Post, all located in New York City, and to the National Enquirer in Boca Raton, Florida. They contained a coarse brown granular material that turned out to be a particularly lethal form of weaponized anthrax spores. Soon five people would be dead.

A few weeks later, on November 12, an Airbus A300 en route to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic crashed shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens. A rudder failure caused the plane to pitch downward into the Belle Harbor neighborhood in that same borough of Queens. All 260 people aboard the plane and five bystanders on the ground were killed. It was the second-deadliest aviation accident ever on US soil.

As 2001 ended, the world seemed to be coming unglued and OEM was sagging under the burden of a multitude of crises. It was getting crushed, under siege by a herd of dragons to be slayed and wave after wave of white-hot problems to be solved. 

But the OEM staff held together as a team. They called everybody in the OEM rolodex who could help them. Few said no. They kept a calm composure. They told everybody what was happening; they set the battle rhythm. They answered the questions that nobody else would answer and solved the problems that no one else would solve.

Rather than break, they stood their ground—on a thousand-square-foot podium—smack in the middle of the chaos. And they got through it, working amidst the deafening tumult, twenty-four hours a day for nearly a year. 2001 was the year of the worst tragedy in the history of New York. It was also the year that OEM—and the city of New York—triumphed.

Kelly R McKinney is the Senior Director of Emergency Management + Enterprise Resilience for NYU Langone Health. He is the former Deputy Commissioner for Preparedness at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and Chief Disaster Officer at the American Red Cross in Greater New York. He is the author of Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them that was released in July 2018 by Post Hill Press.