Steve Strunsky
nj.com
(TNS)
Union leaders said Tuesday that Newark fire officials have failed to conduct a standard annual safety audit that might have called attention to understaffing and a lack of shipboard training and operating procedures and possibly preventing the deaths of two firefighters last week.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka branded the assertion as untrue, insisting the department does conduct an annual review and that his administration was moving as fast as it could to fully staff the fire department under proscribed hiring protocols.
Local officials of the Newark Firefighters and Newark Fire Officers unions joined with leaders of their state and national umbrella organizations for a press conference Tuesday, six days after the fire aboard the 792-foot Grande Costa D’Avorio, which the Coast Guard declared “officially out” only hours earlier that day. Veteran Newark firefighters Augusto “Augie” Acabou, 45, and Wayne “Bear” Brooks Jr., 49, died after boarding the ship to fight the fire, which injured five others.
During the press conference, Capt. Anthony Tarantino, president of the officers union and a 34-year veteran of the department, said he had never seen a report that should accompany the annual review called for under standards developed by the National Fire Protection Association and adopted by the city.
The official, including Newark Firefighters Union President Michael Giunta, also cited what they said was a staffing shortage, insisting that trucks regularly respond to fires with a single captain and two firefighters when the standard contingent is five or six.
Ed Kelly, president of the Washington-based International Association of Firefighters, was at Tuesday’s press conference and appealed to Baraka to conduct what he said was an overdue departmental safety review.
“What we’ve asked is to sit down in partnership with the mayor to conduct a joint safety audit, so that we can look at all of the deficiencies within the NFD,” Kelly said, referring to the Newark department. “Had we done that, say, a year ago, and implemented the recommendations in that safety audit, we would have had better staffing, we would have had better training, we could have pre-planned for fires at the port.”
Baraka dismissed the suggestion as redundant, in light of the annual safety review he insisted the department conducts and an investigation of the fatal fire that the U.S. Coast Guard is leading in conjunction with several agencies, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the port’s operator.
“All that happens anyway,” Baraka said. “The U.S. Coast Guard is doing it.”
He said the unions’ assertion that the city had failed to staff the department adequately was “a lie.”
“When we staff the fire department, it’s like the police department. You have to go through an academy,” Baraka said. “So if there’s 50 vacancies, you certify 60 or 70 people. It does not mean that 60 or 70 people are going to make it.”
“It means that whoever makes it through the academy is going to become a firefighter, and then we have to keep putting classes on,” Baraka added. “We’ve done this every single year, sometimes multiple times a year, and have a class in now with 9 (firefighters) about to come out, and we’re about to put another class of 50 in. So when they start talking about staffing, that’s disingenuous. It makes it seem like the city is not putting people in the academy, and that’s not true.”
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