Facing mounting criticism for a poor response during the blizzard that buried New York City last month, the chief of the Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Service was stripped of his command on Wednesday.
The announcement that the chief, John Peruggia, was being demoted made him the first person to be reassigned in the wake of criticism over the way the city’s E.M.S. and sanitation workers performed during the blizzard. Several neighborhoods were left buried in snow for days after a tepid emergency response, and the city’s 911 dispatchers were forced to struggle with tens of thousands of calls from snowbound residents. As of Wednesday, ambulance delays related to the snow were seen as possible factors in at least three deaths.
Chief Peruggia, who served as the head of E.M.S. Command for six years, was succeeded by Abdo Nahmod, a 25-year veteran of the department who most recently was a deputy assistant chief overseeing emergency medical dispatch, Fire Commissioner Salvatore J. Cassano said in a statement released Wednesday evening. Mr. Cassano said Mr. Peruggia would be moved to a role “to be determined” within the Fire Department.
“Despite Chief Peruggia’s dedicated service to this department, I felt new leadership was needed at this time,” Commissioner Cassano said. “Last week’s blizzard presented tremendous challenges for the Department that are currently being addressed with an eye toward improving performance going forward.”
Mr. Peruggia did not immediately respond to a phone call seeking comment Wednesday. But Patrick Bahnken, president of the Uniformed E.M.T.’s, Paramedics and Fire Inspectors F.D.N.Y., said Mr. Peruggia was being blamed for mistakes that were not in his control.
“I believe that there were some system failures that were certainly beyond his pay grade, and that he simply did not have the authority to make decisions or not make decisions,” he said. “Ultimately I am sure that the commissioner is going to continue to do a thorough review, and we anxiously await the final report when the commissioner is prepared to issue it. Certainly we will be looking at it very carefully.”
But the criticism of his agency’s response was one of at least two factors that led to Mr. Peruggia’s demotion, a city official with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Peruggia was also at the center of an investigation with the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, which was looking into allegations that he took a free trip from a vendor that provides the city with meters that measure either radiation or carbon monoxide, the official said.
In the days after the blizzard, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made it more than clear that he was unhappy with E.M.S.’s performance. Last week he said he was “extremely dissatisfied with the way our emergency response systems performed,” and called the reaction to the snow “a lot worse” than the response to other snowstorms. He also noted that the city’s new director of emergency communications, Skip Funk, would perform an exhaustive review of what went wrong. Several City Council members have also called for a hearing into the storm response.
What is clear is that as the blizzard engulfed New York, thousands of callers to the city’s 911 system struggled to get through. In Brooklyn, roughly 100 front-line 911 operators fielded a flood of frantic calls about everything from minor injuries to major emergencies, all while trying to reroute ambulances and fire trucks, many that were stuck in streets clogged with snow. A 3-month-old boy and a newborn baby died after E.M.S. crews were delayed in responding to calls.
The breakdown came as the city is in the midst of overhauling its fragile 911 system — which is still using outdated radio and dispatch equipment — a project years in the making that is behind schedule and that city officials have said would provide dispatchers with better technology.
Federal prosecutors have also opened an investigation into the response by the Sanitation Department amid allegations of a work slowdown. But Mayor Bloomberg — despite his strong criticism of the E.M.S. response — has defended the Sanitation Department, denying that any intentional slowdown occurred. The sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, and the heads of the sanitation unions have also disputed allegations that workers deliberately botched the cleanup.
