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When the NYPD calls 911
The Emergency Service Unit goes
to work
by Cynthia Brown
American Police Beat
September,
2007
The call came in to the NYPD’s Emergency Service
Unit a little after 5PM on a weekday evening in April last year.
A power failure had knocked out the tramway going between Manhattan
and Roosevelt Island, disabling two tram cars. This left 70
passengers, including two infants, several children, and a disabled
woman, dangling 250 feet above the East River and the streets
of New York. The complicated rescue effort that saved the lives
of every person stranded in the trams looked like a scene right
out of a big budget disaster movie.
These calls are handled
by “Emergency Service” – a highly trained, close-knit unit of
400 officers working out of ten different squads (known in the
NYPD as “Trucks”) throughout the five boroughs of the country’s
largest city. Of the 23 New York City officers who died saving
people from the collapsing World Trade Center buildings on September
11, 14 were from ESU.
Despite the fact that most of the
calls the ESU team members respond to are high-risk, life and
death scenarios, it’s not easy to get assigned to the Emergency
Service Unit. First off, an officer has to be on the job for
at least five years and come equipped with a lot of special
skills just to be considered. Last year there were 4,000 applicants
for just 15 positions.
The physical demands of the specialized
work requires these officers to be extremely agile and calm
under tremendous pressure. Considering the fact that a lot of
the saves take place on bridges and skyscrapers, balance is
critical. A military background, especially a stint with the
Marines or Special Forces, helps – as does a basic knowledge
of rope climbing, engineering, and negotiations.
There
are 22 different tests each officer must past before winning
assignment to ESU, ranging from swimming, to mechanical aptitude,
to agility. But mostly successful candidates have to be extraordinarily
brave to do some of the most dangerous work in the law enforcement
profession.
Although many city agencies responded to
the tram disaster, the rescue of the panicked people stranded
high above the East River would fall to four of NYPD’s finest
– ESU cops Ray Flood, Mike Iliadis, Dave Fiol and Mike Morra.
When they arrived on the scene, they determined that the
diesel generator that powers the system had failed and that
the backup generator had died as well.
With the two
trams dangling from the cables and several NYPD police boats
circling in the East River 250 feet below, the officers assembled
a rescue cage on the fly and put a call out for a large crane
so the rescued passengers could be brought down safely to land.
“We got the bucket assembled and when the crane showed up
we were ready to roll,” Ray Flood remembered. “We took hundreds
of feet of rope, harnesses, water, baby food, diapers and bottles
and baggies for the people who had to go to the bathroom and
got into the cage.”
As the steel bucket with the NYPD
rescue team moved out over the 3100-foot stretch of cable, propelled
by self-generated diesel power towards one of the disabled trams,
the anxious passengers made eye contact with their saviors.
Convincing a mother to hand over her infant to the waiting
officers would take all of their negotiation skills. Mike Morra
said he understood a parent’s perspective in that kind of life
and death situation.
“Can you imagine being stranded
250 feet above a river, it’s pitch dark, and now you have to
hand your infant up to the arms of a person you don’t know and
can barely see?” Morra asked. “That had to be very hard for
them.”
For ESU cops, dangling hundreds of feet above
the icy East River is just another day at the office. It’s a
little scarier for civilians.
“We had a safety net under
the rescue bucket,” Morra continued. “We told them to get up
one at a time and crawl out the window into the gap where we
were waiting for them. I think for some of those people, trusting
us enough to take their children and bring them to safety was
the hardest thing they ever did.”
The rescue took over
12 hours. It was close to five in the morning before the last
person was brought down. When it was all over, everyone was
safe on the ground and not one person had
Inspector James
Dean, a 26-year veteran of the department, is the commander
of Emergency Service. Dean has had other commands but it’s clear
he loves his current assignment, and his pride in the team is
obvious.
The camaraderie here is great,” he says, and
quickly confirmed that the competition you sometimes see in
other units is not an issue with ESU officers. “The officers
in Emergency Service do the most difficult tactical and rescue
work in the City of New York,” Dean says. “They have to depend
on each other. They execute thousands of high-risk warrants
and mostly they do it without ever exchanging gunfire. They’re
real professionals.”
Ray Kelly, who is currently serving
his second stint as NYPD commissioner, the only one in the history
of the City of New York to get the top job in law enforcement
twice, has nothing but respect for the work performed by the
400 officers assigned to ESU.
“Emergency Service officers
are the most highly trained in the NYPD,” Kelly said. “These
men and women are emergency medical technicians, psychological
counselors and heavy weapons experts. They can do it all.”
Learning from the pros
Hundreds of tactical officers
have made the pilgrimage to New York City to watch, talk to
and learn from their colleagues in the NYPD’s Emergency Service
Unit. One would be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t return
home from their visit struck by the volume, variety, and intensity
of the calls.
Each of the ten squads responds to an average
of 10,000 calls per year – a huge number when you consider ESU
officers respond only to the most serious incidents like shots
fired, hostage takings, barricade jobs, jumpers, EDPs, biological
and radiation threats and bomb calls of all varieties. Everyone
in the unit is scuba certified. There are currently eight women
assigned to the unit.
Perhaps the most dangerous work
performed by Emergency Service cops is done by members of the
Fugitive Apprehension Team. These are the officers who serve
warrants and bring in the city’s most violent criminals. A lot
of this work goes on between three and four in the morning and
is extremely dangerous. “We like to get them when they’re drowsy,”
one officer said.
Rich Miller, who’s been with the NYPD
almost 20 years and assigned to ESU since 1993, is one of the
department’s top snipers. Miller said that all the visitors
he’s met have been amazed that the radio crackles pretty much
around the clock and members of the squad frequently go from
call to call never having time to return to the station. For
the ESU, New York City is literally the city that never sleeps.
The training is extensive. Once an officer gets assigned
to the unit, it takes over one year before they are considered
ready for action. Seven full months of training is followed
by another five months of working with an experienced member
of the team. Only after that year does the department consider
the officer ready to go.
Every ESU cop is a fully trained
EMT, skills they are called to use all the time from “pin jobs”
(extracting people and bodies from car wrecks, collapsed scaffolding,
and malfunctioning elevators) to delivering babies on the highway,
in apartment buildings and even in their own police vehicles.
They all have Hazmat training and do rotations with the
NYPD’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Unit. They get called
out on “powder jobs,” suspicious packages, and terrorist threats,
just to name a few. And if you wonder why these ESU cops carry
their own tranquilizer guns, it’s because they also respond
to calls where they must face off against a fully grown tiger
holed up in an apartment or a Komodo dragon slithering around
a hallway.
They are regularly called upon to rescue everyone
from a jumper perched on a ledge 50 stories above a New York
City street, to children taken hostage, to families trapped
in the wreckage of a horrific car accident. They will rush to
help construction workers dying under collapsed scaffolding
or a car full of office workers severely injured in an elevator
that plummeted 40 floors. For those unfortunate souls who find
themselves caught up in the worst situations in America’s greatest
city, the officers at Emergency Services are the best shot they’ve
got.
As one NYPD official said, “They’re out there doing
God’s work.”
Among the tens of thousands of calls they
roll out to every year, an incident that happened last summer
ranks up there among the most unusual. It was a beautiful summer
afternoon when the call came in for a multi-vehicle accident
on one of the city’s beltways.
“When we got there, among
the numerous vehicles that had crashed into each other was an
18-wheeler flat bed truck with a single crated cargo that had
fallen into the road,” explained John Latanzio. “The truck driver
was waving around his bill of lading and was extremely upset.”
Once the ESU cops from Truck 3 reviewed the paperwork, they
quickly became as distraught as the truck driver. It seems the
broken crate that had been forced onto the highway after the
impact of the cars plowing into it from behind, contained a
Tomahawk Cruise Missile and no one knew if it was ready to blow
up, leak radiation or even launch.
“That job was one
of the most frightening incidents I’ve responded to,” Latanzio
added. “It took hours but we cleared the area and waited until
some nuclear engineers could be flown in by helicopter to advise
us what to do. I remember looking at that paperwork and thinking
I was seeing things.”
Last year’s rescue of 70 people stranded high above the East
River on two disabled trams is a perfect case study highlighting
the phenomenal work performed by the NYPD’s Emergency Service
Unit. Above, Mike Morra reaches for a panicked passenger while
Mike Iliadis (crouched under Morra) waits to help.
Officers rescue boy from Tram
ESU Officers Dave Fiol (left
facing camera) and Seth Gahr (now serving with the New Hampshire
State Police) bring Dax Maier to safety after rescuing him from
a disabled cable car that stranded 70 people high above the
East River. It took 13 hours to get everyone back on the ground
– there were no injuries.
ESU saves jumper:
Brave cops, dangerous work. Saving jumpers
is routine work for the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit. New York
City has thousands of high buildings and bridges making these
jobs extremely dangerous. (Left to right) Larry Olivetti, Greg
Mathias, Sgt. Eddie Allen, Paul Pericone.
Dave Brink:
Dave Brink has been with Emergency Service since
1996. One call that still bothers him occurred when he was serving
warrants with the Apprehension Team. “We hit a drug apartment
– one of the suspects had an MP5. We told everyone to put their
hands up on the wall,” Brink remembered. “A little boy about
three years old put his little hands up on the wall just like
an experienced perp. That was tough. I even called my wife to
talk it out.”
Mike Garcia:
Mike Garcia had just rescued a woman with a
broken leg from the World Trade Center on September 11 when
the first building collapsed. That sound is something he will
never forget. “We took cover under the overhang of Building
5 – that saved us,” Garcia said. “The dust was terrible – it
was like acid was thrown into our eyes. My corneas were badly
scratched and my vision was screwed up for a long time.”
Rich Miller:
Rich Miller is one of the NYPD’s top snipers.
When officials that pose serious security problems visit New
York City, like General Musharaff from Pakistan, most likely
Rich will be heading up the team providing protection. He worked
the Apprehension Team for years serving warrants on some of
the most dangerous people in America. Rich is well known throughout
the department as the officer who risked his life to take out
a gunman who was holed up in a basement stairwell with hundreds
of rounds of ammunition with the intent of killing as many cops
as he could. When Rich got his shot, the gunman had already
severely wounded five New York City officers. (Photo by Neal
Kemp)
Richard Gundacker:
Richard “Gunny” Gundacker was an EMT before
joining the NYPD. Every member of Emergency Service is a trained
EMT and they are called upon to use those skills constantly.
One of the newer members of Truck 3, Gunny’s fellow officers
say he is already an invaluable member of the team and has gone
the extra mile to organize barbecues and family events that
create a real atmosphere of camaraderie throughout the Unit.
Mike Ryan
Mike Ryan has been a highly respected member of
the ESU team for ten years. One of his colleagues said Mike
is always willing to generously share his time and experience
with younger members of the Unit and that everyone in ESU looks
up to him.
Ray Flood:
Ray Flood, a long serving veteran of ESU, is one
of the NYPD’s top experts on rope rescues, a skill he teaches
to other officers during tactical training offered by the NYPD.
Ray played a key role in the rescue effort after the attacks
of 9/11. Three of Ray’s fellow officers from Truck 3 never came
home that day – Vincent Danz, Walter Weaver, and Jerome Dominguez.
Squad One:
Squad 1 from Truck 3 returning to the office after
a counter-terrorism assignment. Left to right: Tony Otero, Richie
Gundacker, Sgt. Will Flores, Ray Neuman and John Latanzio.
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