The Special Operations Division (SOD) of the New York City Emergency Medical Service (NYC*EMS) has the responsibilty to respond to all Mass Casualty Incidents (MCI) in the biggest city in the United States. But the unit also has a number of other various duties.
All members of the unit are trained in such areas as: confined space rescue, transit rescues (Involving trains and subways and auto extrication), on-scene emergency management, and incident management. They are essentially a cross or a mixture of the NYPD Emergency Services Unit (ESU), and an FDNY Rescue and Tactical Support Unit.
The unit will respond to second alarm fires, subway incidents, incidents involving airliners or anything that involves five or more patients. The members of unit are very well motivated and really to a large extent have free rein on what incidents that they will respond to.
Members of the NYC*EMS SOD are all Hazardous Materials technicians and their main responsibility at the scene of a HazMat incident is to provide Decontamination (Decon).
The SOD members are issued pagers and radios that they carry at all times because they are on 24 hour call. The SOD covers the entire City of New York with their Emergency Response Squad, which is a converted former NYPD ESU Radio Emergency Patrol vehicle (REP - one of the smaller NYPD ESU units, not one of those big rigs the size of a heavy rescue vehicle.) The Emergency Response Squad is manned by two EMT-D's. It carries all of the decon equipment, Basic Life Support (BLS) equipment and even a generator so that the unit is able to provide power and/or lighting at the scene of an incident.
The unit takes part in all the pre-planning and does provide coverage at the locations of special events. Some recent events that the unit has covered are: New Year's Eve in Times Square, the New York City Marathon, Pope John Paul II's recent visit, and the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations.
The NYC*EMS unit is headquarted in Brooklyn at East 83rd Street and Foster Avenue. The NYC*EMS units 30 Henry and the Advanced Life Support (ALS) unit 30 X-Ray act as back-up to the SOD. Both of these rigs are 911 response units, but respond to MCI's. The medics are Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) trained and can be activated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should they be needed.
The NYC*EMS is a very large organization that handles the emergency medical needs of one of the largest cities in the world. They are comprised of a mixture of BLS and ALS units, unlike Chicago which is all ALS ambulances.
The New York EMS system appears to operate a bit different than the EMS system run by the Chicago Fire Department. If a call comes in for the potential of an MCI, the NYC*EMS rolls a number of rigs to scene as soon as possible. An example of this would be an incident that happened at 1915 EST on January 3rd. There was a report of a Metro North train on fire in The Bronx at 155th Street and the Major Deegen Expressway. First reports indicated that the engine of the train was on fire and had derailed. It was believed that about 600 people were aboard. Immediately, the NYC*EMS responded with four ALS, four BLS ambulances, an assistant chief, Emergency Response Squad 3, MERV ONE (Major Emergency Response Vehicle), and two NYC*EMS patrol field officers. The FDNY arrived upon the scene and quickly knocked the fire down. There was no derailment and it wasn't even necessary to evacuate the train. There were no injuries and the train proceeded on to its destination soon after.
By comparison, a reported fire on a passenger train in Chicago would have produced a full Still and Box Alarm assignment, but there would had been nowhere near the EMS resources immediately responding to such an incident. The CFD incident commander on the scene would had to assess the situation and THEN would had ordered what resources would be required. Also, Chicago does not have the heavy rescue resources that New York City has. Besides the FDNY Rescue companies, New York City also has the NYPD ESU.
It appears that NYC*EMS has a pretty good thing going, but there is some uncertainty in the organization at this time. The NYC*EMS is due to be merged soon into the New York City Fire Department. Many medics are excited about the prospect, but are not sure how the merger will effect them and their current duties.
The author wishes to thank NYC*EMS SOD member Frank McCarton for his great assistance with this article.