FDNY Swift Water Rescue Operations

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The Fire Department of New York (FDNY) Special Op-erations Command (SOC) for the past couple of years has been preparing its members to respond to another major disaster in New York City (NYC). The vision of having a specialized task force with members of the SOC was planned by rescue chiefs prior to September 11, 2001, but the chiefs were subsequently killed when NYC was attacked on September 11, 2001. Following these attacks on NYC, it was more apparent than ever that the FDNY SOC needed a cache of equipment and tools to respond to any major disaster in or around NYC so that it could operate independently of the on-duty five rescue and seven squad companies. With the support of FDNY staff, a team was assembled to build an All Hazards Task Force that would resemble a FEMA Urban Search & Rescue (US&R) team but would have more robust capabilities. Equipment and tools were procured. Over the past five years, the FDNY SOC Task Force (TF) was organized and continues to be built. The need for a separate cache of equipment and tools to supplement SOC rescue and squad companies during a major event that requires maximum resources was validated during Hurricane Sandy.

The first test of the TF was in April 2011 when a team of SOC members was deployed to the Center for National Response (CNR) training facility in Gallagher, West Virginia, to operate with the FDNY Incident Management Team (IMT) at a simulated bomb attack in the Midtown Tunnel. Both teams operated for more than four days in a first-of-its-kind exercise. Integrating a search and rescue TF with an IMT from the same city worked extremely well, and many valuable lessons were learned. The TF was able to build off this exercise and to fix any deficiencies identified.