FDNY Fire Fighters Help Foil Times Square Terror Attack

June 2, 2010 -- The call that came in on the evening of May 1 appeared routine for Local 854 fire fighters who responded: a car fire a few blocks away requesting one engine and one truck.

But the responding fire fighters were trained to expect the unexpected. “Whenever we get a call coming from Times Square, we know to be on extra alert,” says Lieutenant Mike Barvels, who with Lieutenant John Kazan, both members of Uniformed Fire Officers Association (UFOA) Local 854, responded to the call.

A street vendor first noticed smoke coming from a nearby vehicle at about 6:30 p.m. and notified a police officer who then alerted the FDNY.

The fire station sits just a few blocks from Times Square. With Barvels leading the way on Engine 54, Kazan followed with Ladder Truck 4. The crew arrived at the scene in six minutes, finding a 1990 Nissan Pathfinder parked askew with one wheel on the curb.

Engine 54 pulled up in front of the car, while Truck 4 parked well behind, blocking traffic so police and fire fighters could do their work.

It was clear that what could have been a routine call was a potentially game-changing terrorist incident in the heart of Manhattan.

The clues came swiftly. While a typical car fire involves dark, billowing smoke, the smoke wafting around inside the Pathfinder was light, white and slow-moving. One fire fighter on the scene reported seeing sparks and hearing what sounded like fire crackers going off inside the car. Other clues included the Connecticut license plates, blinking hazard lights and a skewed parking job.

The driver, believed to be Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen who was later arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport, was nowhere in sight.

“A tourist from Connecticut isn’t going to walk away from a parked car with its hazards on in the middle of Times Square,” says Kazan.

Both lieutenants quickly decided not to turn a hose onto the car, but rather alert the battalion chief of the situation, set up a charge line and use a thermal imaging camera on the car. The camera revealed that heat was present toward the front of the car but not the back, atypical of standard car fires.

The fire fighters then called for the New York Police Department’s Emergency Services Unit (ESU) to further investigate, running a check on the Connecticut license plates. That check showed that the car was not registered.

Both fire fighters and police realized that the smoldering and crackling inside the vehicle could be signs of a car bomb – a possible terror attack in the heart of Times Square. On a Saturday night. With throngs of people squeezed into a narrow canyon of concrete, steel and glass.

But the perpetrator, apparently poorly schooled in the dark art of car bomb assembly, would be caught alive and ready to sing. Property and people were preserved and the lesson of the day would be that training and experience pay off.

“There are always tons of cops in Times Square. Once we realized that this could be some kind of attack they started backing people up and expanding the evacuation area,” says Kazan, who moved his ladder truck back by another block, widening the distance between people on the street and a possible explosion.

The expanded evacuation area made the standard traffic snarls of Saturday night in Times Square much worse, and ESU had to maneuver through the jam to get to the scene, where they spent several hours finding and disabling the components of a home-made bomb ¬– propane tanks, gasoline and fireworks.

The fire fighters’ decision to delay turning a hose onto the car and put in motion steps for further investigation of the scene later proved crucial. Several clues uncovered inside the vehicle helped the FBI swiftly track down and arrest the driver before he was able to leave the country.

“Since 9/11, the IAFF has made a hazardous materials and anti-terror training an essential component of fire fighter education,” says IAFF General President Harold Schaitberger. “These fire fighters put their training to work and helped foil this potentially deadly bomb attempt.”

Lieutenant Jim McGowan, a representative with Local 854, also praised the work of the fire fighters. “The actions and decisions made by Kazan and Barvels were cautious and textbook. Due to their fire fighting experience and terrorist training, they did not like what they saw, properly sized up the situation and saved the lives of FDNY fire fighters and the public.”

Both Barvels and Kazan agreed the training they have received over the years, from the basic level to post-9/11 terror attack response training, gave them with the skills to help foil the attempted terrorist attack in Times Square.

The IAFF offers training to handle such incidents. One course, Emergency Response to Terrorism: Operations, provides the tools needed to protect responder health and safety, while covering basic defensive actions, personal protective equipment, hazard recognition and identification, pre-incident planning, situational awareness and scene management. The course includes small group activities and real-life case studies.

For more information, visit the IAFF web site at www.iaff.org