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NEW YORK, NY May 13, 2006 —The Fire Department and the MTA have agreed to provide extra access for firefighters in a deep underground tunnel of the new Long Island Rail Road terminal, which is to be built in Midtown. The compromise comes after WNYC learned that the Fire Department was unhappy with the MTA’s original evacuation plan. WNYC’s Beth Fertig reports.

REPORTER: The new train terminal is called East Side Access and it’s been on the drawing board for years. The plan is to bring Long Islanders from Queens directly to Midtown, so they don’t have to rely solely on Penn Station. The trains would pull into a station 15 stories below Grand Central Terminal.

Three years ago, the Fire Department began asking questions about emergency access in the Manhattan tunnel. The department was concerned about a section beneath Second Avenue where the nearest exits would be 31-hundred feet apart: More than half a mile. That’s not unusual in deep train tunnels. But industry standards call for passages between train tunnels whenever the exits are more than 2500 feet apart. James Lake is a senior fire protection specialist with the National Fire Protection Assocation, which wrote the standards.

LAKE: The exit route is intended to take someone from the tunnel all the way out. The cross passageway is intended to take someone in the tunnel that’s experiencing the emergency, from that tunnel into a parallel tunnel that is separated from the emergency.

REPORTER: The MTA had designed these cross passages to be 800 feet apart, the minimum set by the industry. But the fire department wanted them to be closer – no more than 500 feet apart. In 2003, the MTA’s code coordinator objected to that. In a letter to the Fire Department, he said such a distance, quote, “cannot be reasonably achieved and is in significant excess of the requirements.”

That spawned a stern response from the FDNY’s commanding officer, Robert Weinman. In November of 2003, Weinman wrote a letter to the MTA stating that when designing East Side Access, quote, “You must take into account the requirement, experience and the expertise of the Fire Department that you will be calling upon to protect your passengers, employees, property and equipment in the event of an incident.”

WNYC obtained these letters under the Freedom of Information Law. There were no more correspondences after 2003. When asked about the dispute last week, the Fire Department said the two sides were still negotiating. The MTA had no response. But yesterday, the MTA’s head of capital construction held a meeting with the Fire Department’s Chief of Operations. The meeting was held after WNYC raised questions over the three-year old correspondence. An MTA spokesman said the two sides had come to an agreement to provide extra passageways for the firefighters.

James Long of the National Fire Protection Association says it’s not unusual for agencies to disagree about the standards, because they’re just that: standards. He says they were written with the goal of getting passengers out of a tunnel.

LAKE: The NYC fire department has every right to ask for something more for their purposes of accessing, which is very different. It’s a very different approach.

REPORTER: Transit groups and some politicians have also been raising safety questions about East Side Access based on the sheer scope of the project. The MTA has designed high speed escalators to take Long Island Rail Road passengers from the platform to mezzanine. In the event of a fire or other emergency, the head of capital construction has said that passengers could get to a designated point of safety within the four minute industry standard. And the federal government has approved this plan. Gene Russianoff, an attorney with the Straphangers Campaign, says he’s pleased the fire department and the MTA were able to agree on improving emergency access for firefighters.

RUSSIANOFF: I think it’s important to be straight with the public and to be transparent and open about what the safety features from the LIRR connection to Grand Central Terminal. As a rider I can’t tell you whether it’s safe or not safe. I rely on the fire dept working with the MTA and federal officials to guarantee the safety of the 70,000 people who will go into that station in the morning and 75,000 people in the evening.

REPORTER: In an age when transit riders are increasingly concerned about safety, he says that sense of trust is essential. The federal government has given preliminary approval for awarding hundreds of millions of dollars to East Side Access. Construction on the tunnel leading to Grand Central Terminal could start as soon as this year and the project is scheduled to open in 2012. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.