Most city firefighters have experienced some degree of déjà vu on the job.
The alarm sounds and they rush to a fire in a vacant building where they battled a previous blaze weeks, months or years earlier.
“It’s the norm,” said Paterson Fire Chief Brian McDermott. “Multiple fires in the same building.”
City officials are trying to address that problem by using about $730,000 in federal housing funds to buy construction equipment that municipal employees will use to demolish unsafe vacant and abandoned structures. McDermott said he doesn’t know of any other cities in New Jersey with a similar program. Paterson’s innovative approach to fire safety almost got entangled in bureaucratic red tape.
Mayor Andre Sayegh had planned to unveil the first piece of equipment, an excavator, at a press conference in April. But on the morning of the event, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) notified Paterson that the city could not using federal Community Development Block Grant money to buy the demolition equipment.