Opinion

A debt of honor to the FDNY

For firefighters, as with fighter pilots, speed is life.

The sooner water is laid on flame, the sooner the fire is out. Get it on quickly enough, and a major blaze might be avoided altogether.

Conversely, when there is fire but no water, people often die — sometimes quite unnecessarily.

Such was the case on Aug. 18, 2007, at the old Deutsche Bank building at Ground Zero, where two New York City firefighters paid with their lives for the staggering incompetence of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

Of course, it wasn’t just the LMDC at fault for the deaths of Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino on that stifling Saturday afternoon.

The FDNY had violated its own rules by failing to develop a comprehensive plan for fighting a fire in the building, which had been fatally damaged by falling debris on 9/11. Nor had it conducted mandated inspections of the structure.

And so it was that Beddia and Graffagnino were among the firefighters who rode an exterior elevator to the hulk’s 17th floor, where a fire caused by a construction worker’s discarded cigarette had taken hold and was spreading.

In short order, they discovered that the standpipe meant to deliver fire-fighting water to that floor was dry.

And then they learned that the stairwells leading away from the blaze had been blocked tight.

LMDC demolition subcontractors had long since cut the building’s standpipe and sealed its stairwells — and because the FDNY had ignored its inspection regimen, this had gone unnoticed.

The firefighters were defenseless — and they were trapped; the wonder of it all is that only two brave men died that day.

So it is that the LMDC — and thus the two elected officials to whom it now answers, Michael Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo — have much for which to answer.

Happily, just such an answer is at hand.

The LMDC, created as a funnel for federal relief money after 9/11, may be closing up shop soon — and it has both $700 million in leftover cash and no end of imaginative supplicants lined up seeking some action.

Among them are advocates for a performing arts center and an East River esplanade — arguably worthy causes in less trying fiscal times, but something less than that these days.

Also under consideration are money-down-a-rathole “economic development” projects — usually compelling evidence that an agency has more money to spend than the good sense needed to spend it wisely.

At the same time, there is much wisdom in the suggestion of Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy — who proposed in Sunday’s Post that $350 million of the LMDC surplus be dedicated to maintaining the manpower, equipment and training of the FDNY.

Self-serving, you say?

But the deaths of Beddia and Graffagnino speak to the efficacy of getting water on a fire in a hurry — and Mayor Bloomberg’s 2011-12 budget stands to slow the process.

He seeks to:

* Close 20 firehouses.

* Reduce the number of men assigned to handle hoses on pumper trucks.

Thus firefighters will take longer to get to some fires, and longer than that getting set up to fight them.

So the interests best served by Cassidy’s proposal are those of his firefighters, for sure, but all New Yorkers, too.

Bloomberg would do well simply to make the FDNY whole; it certainly seems that he has found sufficient money of late to do just that.

The mayor being the mayor (can you say stubborn?), that’s not likely.

Not directly, anyway.

But, as noted, the mayor has a lot to say about how the LMDC is run. If he were to insist that the agency use a substantial portion of its leftover cash to endow a Beddia/Graffagnino foundation dedicated precisely to maintaining the operational integrity of the world’s best urban fire department, he’d have his way.

Certainly Gov. Cuomo — the LMDC’s other principal — would be hard-pressed to object.

The LMDC, and those associated with it, are indelibly stained by the deaths of Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino.

A dept of honor is outstanding.

It must be paid. mcmanus@nypost.com