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The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities
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About The Fires: How A Computer Formula, Big Ideas, And
Product Description New York City, 1968. The RAND Corporation had presented an alluring proposal to a city on the brink of economic collapse: Using RAND's computer models, which had been successfully implemented in high-level military operations, the city could save millions of dollars by establishing more efficient public services. The RAND boys were the best and brightest, and bore all the sheen of modern American success. New York City, on the other hand, seemed old-fashioned, insular, and corrupt-and the new mayor was eager for outside help, especially something as innovative and infallible as "computer modeling." A deal was struck: RAND would begin its first major civilian effort with the FDNY. Over the next decade-a time New York City firefighters would refer to as "The War Years"-a series of fires swept through the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Brooklyn, gutting whole neighborhoods, killing more than two thousand people and displacing hundreds of thousands. Conventional wisdom would blame arson, but these fires were the result of something altogether different: the intentional withdrawal of fire protection from the city's poorest neighborhoods-all based on RAND's computer modeling systems. Despite the disastrous consequences, New York City in the 1970s set the template for how a modern city functions-both literally, as RAND sold its computer models to cities across the country, and systematically, as a new wave of technocratic decision-making took hold, which persists to this day. In The Fires, Joe Flood provides an X-ray of these inner workings, using the dramatic story of a pair of mayors, an ambitious fire commissioner, and an even more ambitious think tank to illuminate the patterns and formulas that are now inextricably woven into the very fabric of contemporary urban life. The Fires is a must read for anyone curious about how a modern city works. Amazon.com Review : As Howard Cosell announced to a national television audience in 1977, the Bronx was indeed burning, as it did throughout the decade, displacing hundreds of thousands of residents and turning acres of city blocks into ghost towns. But why? The usual suspect was arson, by greedy slumlords encouraged by wrong-headed welfare schemes, but in his first book, The Fires, Joe Flood tells a different story. Tracing the history of the New York fire department, and especially the career of one of its most dynamic and dominant leaders, Chief John O'Hagan, he argues convincingly that the borough burned because the firefighters left, pulled away by department planners who claimed their computer efficiency formulas could do more by spending less. Writing a Best and the Brightest for the urban crisis, Flood takes you on a harrowing ladder-level tour of city firefighting, while performing the more difficult feat of making intellectual and bureaucratic history just as fascinating and dramatic. --Tom Nissley Author Q&A with Joe Flood Joe Flood is a journalist who has spent years researching the facts and implications of the epidemic of fires that swept through New York City in the 1970s. Q: The subtitle of your book is “How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City – and Determined the Future of Cities.” That’s quite a mouthful! What gives this story such broad and lasting significance? A: Yeah, that’s sort of the joke—it took me five years to research and write the book, and about 4 years and 11 months before we settled on a subtitle. It is a mouthful but we were trying to figure out something that gave a sense of the different areas the book hits on. At heart it’s a narrative about a city that was burning down and going bankrupt and the men and women of the fire department, city government and burning neighborhoods that dealt with those fires. But to tell that story I needed to dig into all kinds of other fields. Urban planning, economics, the history of computer modeling, political reform
