ETHICS AND WORK IN EMERGENCIES 215Now the reclassification of the hazard traditionally assigned to the fire
service as readily preventable, and the new emphasis on fire prevention, indi-
cates a move away from conceiving the fire service primarily as an emergency
response organization. On the other hand, there is evidence in the White
Paper of a wish for a fire service that will become anewsort of emergency
response organization. These contradictory tendencies seem to point to a
downgrading and an upgrading of the fire service at the same time. Both
tendencies carry moral risks. First, the policy of reducing the size of the
fire service can intensify the sense of being undervalued that was widely
expressed during the FBU strike. This can compound the demoralization
that is bound to be felt already by the fire service in the face of the high
and increasing numbers of malicious false alarms. Second, the downgrading
is not likely to be counterbalanced by the ‘upgrading’ just mentioned. On
the contrary, assigning particularly daunting new hazards to the fire ser-
vice can be a threat rather than a morale-boosting opportunity, since the
chances of mishandling the abnormal and hard-to-control are bound to be
high.
Terrorism in particular needs to be considered. The September 11 attacks in
New York City led to the deaths of 343 firefighters, including very senior and
experienced officers. These people were not readily replaced, and their loss
affected the capacity of the Fire Dept of New York to attend even to normal
emergencies immediately after September 11. The FDNY’s strategic plan for
2004–5 highlights the challenge posed by terrorism, and also indicates the
huge scale of the task of becoming prepared for a repeat of September 11 in a
city like New York. About 150 locations have been identified as high-priority
risk sites, and plans for protecting only 65 are being developed to begin with
(NYC strategic plan 2004).
Although New York and other major American cities are particularly vul-
nerable to the sort of high-profile attack that Al Qaeda seem to prefer, the
threat from that group has already been shown to be international. The bomb-
ing of a commuter train in Madrid; the firebombing of nightclubs used by
Western tourists in Bali; these are a sample of what could easily be reproduced
virtually anywhere. Britain has already been singled out as a priority target,
and the July attack on the London underground may well be followed by even
worse things. This probably poses more of a problem for the London Fire
Brigade than for the UK fire service in general, but one of the lessons of Sep-
tember 11 is that a successful attack can leave casualties in sufficient numbers
to require some sort of pool of trained personnel as possible replacements.
This pool would presumably be made up of firefighters from brigades outside
London. In this way the problem of terrorism for a major city can become a
problem for a fire service nationally.
Terrorism is not a preoccupation of the Bain report, and the relative neglect
of the problem may call into question Bain’s vision of a fire service with a