|
HOME
CONTACT US
SSC TECHNICAL
ADVISORY PANEL
MILITANT LETTERS
TO THE EDITOR
MUST-READ ARTICLES
MEETINGS/EVENTS
PUBLIC SPEAKING
UPDATES & NEWS
WTC INVESTIGATION
CONTACT NEW YORK
ELECTED OFFICIALS
NOW
|
 |
A Retiree's Crusade: No More Falling High-Rises
By NICHOLE M. CHRISTIAN
October 17, 2002
EVEN though the crisp blue commander's uniform now hangs in
a closet and his radio and helmet have been turned in, Vincent Dunn is, at
heart, still on the job. A firefighter, he says, until the day he
dies.
Actually, Mr. Dunn, 67, retired three years ago as a New
York City deputy fire chief. He is a nationally known lecturer and fire
safety consultant who of late has also become something of a critic, too.
That explains, at least partly, how a man who still uses "we" when he
talks about "the job" wound up in the center of a campaign calling for
fire safety improvements in the city's skyscrapers.
The rest of the story, Mr. Dunn says, has to do with his
being not exactly the retiring type, and with a phone call from the mother
of a young firefighter who died that day in September when the planes
crashed into the World Trade Center.
The mother, Sally Regenhard, wanted an expert to join her
in pressing for safety changes in high-rise building codes. Mr. Dunn,
having something to say on the subject since he spent 15 of his 42 years
on the force battling blazes in some of Manhattan's biggest high-rises,
gladly signed on. Together they have been making the rounds, testifying
several times before the City Council, talking to relatives of 9/11
victims, politicians and anyone else who will listen.
He is besieged with similar requests, evidence, although he
won't admit it, that his knowledge from the front lines of firefighting
has made him a prized commodity. "I came to the job with nothing," he
said, "a high school dropout, and I left with just about everything there
was to learn. Not because I'm smart. I've got a good memory and I work
hard."
Mr. Dunn has written three books: "Collapse of Burning
Buildings" (1988); "Safety and Survival on the Fireground" (1992); and
"Command and Control of Fires and Emergencies" (2001). They are required
reading in fire-safety courses around the country.
In the wake of 9/11, a lot of people outside the classroom
have started listening to Mr. Dunn on the realities of fighting high-rise
fires. "The fire chief, if he wants to keep his job," Mr. Dunn says, "he
can't tell you the truth. He isn't going to come out and say that we can't
extinguish fires in a lot of these newer buildings with 20, 30,000 square
feet of open floor plans. I can tell you because I'm retired."
He says he is also speaking up out of respect for those who
died, especially the firefighters, a hundred of whom he knew personally.
He can name names if you ask him; of men who, on his last day on the job,
gathered for beer and scrawled farewells on a three-foot card that still
sits in his living room.
His views on the collapse of the World Trade Center have
raised a few eyebrows. "There is no other high-rise office building in New
York City that would have pancaked down in 10 seconds," he says. "This was
a fragile, unorthodox construction that should have never been allowed. It
was a disaster waiting to happen."
Mr. Dunn is full of recommendations of how to make New York
City's high-rises safer. See his Web site, vincentdunn.com, for all of
them, but the highlights he reels off sound like a grocery list. Common
sense, he calls them.
"We need antennas in all high-rise buildings to enhance
radio signals," he says. "There are 2,000 high-rises where our radios
don't work. We can't save lives if we can't find out who is in
danger."
Equally important, he says, are automatic sprinklers ("Just
like this city has a zero tolerance for crime, we need a zero tolerance
for nonsprinkler high-rises. No exceptions!") and thicker concrete floors
("The floors are the first to collapse; they're the weak link.").
MORE difficult is the question of who would pay for such
changes. He hasn't quite solved that. "Nobody wants the costs, but all you
can do is hope somebody will step up and realize that we already have two
strikes against us," he says, referring to the World Trade Center's 1993
bombing and then the 2001 attack. "We have to get some of these problems
fixed before we have another disaster on our hands."
Not all of Mr. Dunn's days are spent worrying about
disasters to come. He and his wife, Patricia, live in Douglaston, Queens,
in an English Tudor house purchased, he says proudly, with "her own money"
earned as a draftsman. They have two grandchildren, Emily, 4, and Henry, 4
months old, to dote on. And Mr. Dunn has dahlias and impatiens to tend to,
along with a passport that's "got a lot of empty pages," save for a trip
this summer to Rome, Florence and Venice, arranged by his wife.
"She's the real chief," Mr. Dunn says. And per her request,
he cannot say when they married, lest it hint at her age. But he is
welcome to tell his stories, to give her credit for standing by him during
long nights away from home and for inspiring their children to follow her
love of art instead of his love of firefighting.
Listening to mom appears to have paid off, judging from the
artwork on the walls of every room in the house, oil paintings and bold
graphic illustrations done by their daughter and son, some of which have
turned up in magazines like The New Yorker and The Progressive.
Mr. Dunn knows what he is about to say will sound corny to
some, but he insists every word is true. "I owe everything I have to the
fire service: this house, my children's college educations," he says. "I
feel very indebted, very proud. It made me who I am."
BACK TO TOP
© Copyright (c) 2002, NY Times
|
|
|
