LETTER TO THE EDITOR
To the editor,                                                                               August 20, 2006
I am one of the family members who listened to the latest tapes released by the FDNY. I lost my brother, FDNY Battalion Chief Orio Palmer on 9//11/01. I am still trying to place in context, the dying words of so many.  What can we learn from this? As I was taking notes while listening, there was a reference from a Captain in the FDNY saying to “keep in mind about the helicopter units that have been trained to do thisâ€?. These words stayed with me for several days. I finally asked my husband, who is a Lt. in the FDNY for the last 20 years, “where were the helicopters for the FDNY that day? “ To my astonishment he told me there are no helicopters for the FDNY. The Police Dept. sends their helicopters to a scene when needed. I found it incomprehensible to try and understand WHY there were no knowing and trained eyes in FIRE SAFETY to recognize an imminent or possible collapse in any high rise fire. Shouldn’t the FDNY have its’ own helicopters?  No firefighters went up in the sky, and the police department could not contact the FDNY to warn them of the imminent danger. Many of the BRAVE men who died that fateful day were also BETRAYED by the additional– and colossal– communications failures and radio breakdowns that should have been corrected years
earlier.  I would like to sit down with the fire commissioner and once again ask the same question once posed by a reporter, “Now what would Orio Palmer say you need?� Is anyone listening???
Aggie McCaffrey