The New York Fire Department (FDNY) assigns a chief officer to take charge of operations at WTC Building 7. The chief is initially ordered to put out the fires there. It is determined around this time that there are fires on floors 6-8, 17, 21 and 30. However, there are problems with the water supply: There is no water coming out of the hydrant system nearby, and an FDNY chief officer who has been in WTC 7 says he opened a standpipe on the 4th floor of one stairway, but found no water in the standpipe system. This should not be a problem though, as two or three FDNY fireboats have been tied up on the Hudson shore, specifically to provide water to the site, and lines are already being stretched up to the WTC area. However, as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will later report, “According to the FDNY first-person interviews, water was never an issue at WTC 7 since firefighting was never started in the building. When the Chief Officer in charge of WTC 7 got to Barclay Street and West Broadway, numerous firefighters and officers were coming out of WTC 7. These firefighters indicated that several blocks needed to be cleared around WTC 7 because they thought that the building was going to collapse.” [Firehouse (.com), 9/17/2001; Time Out New York, 9/27/2001; National Institute of Standards and Technology, 9/2005, pp. 110-111] However, one fire captain later claims to have seen numerous firefighters trying to extinguish fires in WTC 7 at some unspecified time after the North Tower collapsed, until they were instructed to stop doing so (see After 10:28 a.m. September 11, 2001).
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