Someone Should Get Fired for This

An Advance investigation has cast serious doubt on a claim Staten Island's highest-ranking fire official made two weeks ago at a public meeting that, on average, six people die while attending a NASCAR race weekend throughout the country.

The FDNY, which originally was mum on his statement, is now not standing behind the claim made by Island Fire Chief Thomas Haring. "Whatever he alluded to or stated is not official FDNY information," said fire spokesman Farrell Sklerov. "It hasn't been put on the desk of the commissioner. It hasn't made it up the chain of command."

Haring said he reached the number by interviewing many fire officials in towns where motor sports developer International Speedway Corp. owns tracks. He did the research in anticipation of an 80,000-plus-seat track ISC is hoping to build on the Island's West Shore -- a controversial plan on which the FDNY has not taken a public stance.

The fire chief presented his finding at a meeting Sept. 7 of the borough's three community boards, and ascribed the deaths to a variety of causes, including fires, spectator car accidents, heart attacks and other medical conditions. He refused to discuss the study further.

But higher-ups in the fire departments across the country that allegedly supplied the New York brass with the information tell a different story: Not only do they dispute the finding, but most say the FDNY never contacted them.

"I don't have any idea where they're getting their statistic," said Ron Avanzolini, special events coordinator for the San Bernardino County Fire Department, which provides firefighters to the California Speedway in Fontana. "Very seldom do we ever have a death at the track. We had one heart attack and that was all [this year] and that was an elderly man with massive heart problems."

Avanzolini also said no one from his department ever spoke to New York fire officials.

Gee, someone inventing statistics to support their case, and that information is then released for public consumption. That's pretty bad. What's worse is that the person pushing this bogus news happened to be the top Staten Island fire department official. Not good.

Expect heads to roll as whoever provided this bogus information, whether it was Fire Chief Thomas Haring or one of his underlings who gathered the information, did so with the express purpose of affecting public opinion on the issue of permitting the construction of a NASCAR track on Staten Island. Politics got in the way of the facts and no one is entitled to their own version of facts.