Reports Look at Cancer Link to 1975 NY Telephone Company Fire

Reports in the New York Post and New York Daily News examined the tragic legacy of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) response to a 1975 fire at the New York Telephone Company in Manhattan.

Retired FDNY firefighter Danny Noonan, who suffers from leukemia, spoke with the Post about the number of cancer cases in firefighters who responded to the fire.

“Young healthy men all of a sudden were developing all of these crazy cancers,” Noonan said in the report. “We started sounding the alarm to the city and the department’s hierarchy. There was no response to our alarm that all these firefighters are getting cancer.”

The Daily News carried an Op-Ed by Perry Berry, a retired reporter for the paper who is the widow of late FDNY Firefighter Michael Berry, Engine 80. Berry noted that although no one died during the February 27, 1975 fire, the fallout from the firefighting operations were tremendous and overlooked. According to Perry, 699 FDNY members working at the fire were exposed to extraordinary amounts of burning polyvinyl chloride (PVC), hydrogen chloride, vinyl chloride monomer, and chlorinated dioxins.

According to the FDNY, firefighters responded at 12:25 a.m. on the day in question to the 11-story building on Second Avenue and 13th Street. The fire had began in a large cable vault located in the cellar that contained 488 telephone cables, with anywhere from 400 to 2,700 pairs of lines and covered in either lead or polyethylene. According to Remembrance Bulletin issued by the department, the structure served as the main telephone switching center for the Lower East Side, and the fire would go to five alarms, with firefighters operating for a two-day period. It spread through the floors of the building via the many void spaces while burning thousands of miles of wires and cables, releasing toxic smoke.

In 1975, there was no medical monitoring of firefighters, and today’s medical monitoring program is indicative of some of the lessons learned from this fire. Behind only 9/11, many consider the New York Telephone Company fire the second most deadly and costliest in the history of the New York City fire department, the bulletin noted. This was the first large PVC fire in New York City and signaled the end of firefighters not wearing self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA). While PVC is now common in many households and workplaces, it produces highly toxic smoke. In 1975, the FDNY did not have a strict SCBA policy, however more than 1,060 SCBA cylinders were provided by the Mask Service Unit along with every spare SCBA at this fire.

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