By Bryan Virasami
Newsday (New York) 
Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.

Now, city fire commanders can instantly see a major fire or disaster anywhere in the five boroughs, at any hour of the day, without ever leaving the Fire Department's high-tech operations center in Downtown Brooklyn.

Giant video wall monitors in the rebuilt, $17-million operations center give emergency officials eyes and ears on the action, minus the chaos, noise and confusion at the scene itself.

Standing in front of several large wall monitors, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said the center allows commanders to manage multiple emergencies across the city and help agencies coordinate responses. The center opened in July, and members of the media were given a tour yesterday.

The impetus for the center was the McKinsey Report, an assessment by a private consultant of the Fire Department's performance after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The report, commissioned by the department, noted that the city lacked a single agency directing emergency response and had poor and spotty radio communication.

Bloomberg said no one knows whether the loss of top commanders or other emergency responders on Sept. 11 could have been prevented if a high-tech center had been functioning that day.

"If they'd had more technology, more coordinated response, I don't know and I don't think anybody knows," Bloomberg said. "What we have to do is to not look back, but just continuously refine and enhance our training and the equipment and the information they have. And one thing you know for sure: The next emergency that they'll be asked to respond to will be different than the last emergency."

Salvatore Cassano, FDNY chief of department, recalled that on Sept. 11, when he came back to the current site to coordinate operations, it was just a small radio room with limited capabilities.

"We had no idea where our apparatus were, no idea where our members were, because we lost all of our command boards," Cassano said. "In the very near future, we're going to have an electronic command board that will transmit wirelessly back to this operations center where all our apparatus are, where are our firefighters who were deployed in those buildings. So we're going to be way ahead of where we were five years ago due to this operations center."

The department lost 343 firefighters on Sept. 11.

Unlike five years ago, the operations center's 75 computers now can help officials see aerial photographs, geographic dimensions and historic data on any building in New York and the surrounding blocks.