FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh is facing a "Mexican standoff" with 10 fire chiefs demanding to be demoted in protest of her personnel moves, a source told the New York Post.
Kavanagh had denied requests of demotion of the 10 protesting FDNY chiefs for nearly six months, asking for a 90-day "cooling-off period," but the lack of action since the mutiny began in February has tensions boiling over, according to the report.
"It's a Mexican standoff," a source told the Post, referring to a standoff where both sides dig in until the bitter, if not fatal, end.
Newsmax reached out to the FDNY for comment and has not heard back.
In a week where a crane caught fire and fell to the streets, scraping a building on the way down, the prospect of the FDNY having to replace experienced leaders "could be disastrous," the source added.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and his deputy Phil Banks are reportedly calling the shots and keeping Kavanagh from granting the demotions, showing the standoff expands far beyond just the FDNY and into city leadership.
But Kavanagh's first deputy Joseph Pfeifer did the situation no favors in April, warning the chiefs seeking demotion should be careful what they wish for.
"There's a lot of very experienced people in the field that we can bring up, that may even have more experience than some of the people that want to self-demote," he told The New York Times' Maureen Dowd in April.
But the lawyer for three demoted chiefs and others filing an age-discrimination lawsuit against Kavanagh and Banks argue the demotions are not coming because the FDNY cannot afford the loss of leadership.
"No one has replaced the chiefs because no one else has the necessary incident-command experience," attorney Jim Walden told the Post. "It's total paralysis."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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