Calvin Drayton’s legacy to NYC
Just before 10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Calvin Drayton was standing with a group of fire, EMS and police chiefs at the FDNY Command Post in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Suddenly, a tremendous staccato roar filled the lobby as thick gray smoke and debris poured in. The chiefs were tossed about like leaves in the wind by the titanic force of the 110-story Tower 2 falling to the Earth.
An NYPD lieutenant, gasping for air in the choking darkness, threw Drayton — all six feet, five inches of him — over his shoulder and carried him to safety. Bloody and battered, Calvin dusted himself off and went back to work, toiling long into the night on that terrible day. This is just one of the legends surrounding this larger-than-life public servant, who passed away on Jan. 31 after a long illness.
Drayton started in the disaster business when he joined the American Red Cross as the deputy director of disaster services in 1992. He was recruited to the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management in 1997 and, shortly after 9/11, was named first deputy commissioner.
First deputy commissioners are the bedrock holding up the massive bureaucracy that is New York City government. The leadership cadre, they are the driving force behind the daily operations of their agencies. Commissioners come and go; first deps stay. And few meant more to their agencies than Drayton. For more than two decades, he was the heart and soul of New York City Emergency Management.
It is NYCEM’s job to see, sizeup, activate and respond to every crisis, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. From cyber attacks to power blackouts, building collapses to steam pipe explosions, blizzards to heat waves to hurricanes, every crisis is completely different. NYCEM applies a consistent protocol to each and for more than two decades there, step one was always “Brief Calvin.”
In the operations briefs around his office or in the situation room, Calvin would fire off questions, walking the duty team through the job, piecing together the who, what, when, where, how and — especially — the why.
This process would continue until the totality of the incident (the “job” as Calvin called it) was laid out for everyone to see: the impacts, the obstacles and unmet needs, the severed connections and the gears that needed to be turned to restore normalcy. No job was too big or too complicated that it couldn’t be fixed, it was just a question of how many conversations it would take.
And Calvin was the master of these conversations; he had the “juice”. He carried a complex organization chart around in his head with the players who could turn the gears in the vast machinery of city government. He built relationships with countless state, federal, nonprofit and private sector colleagues and would call them at all hours of the day or night with an “ask” to get the job on track.
A generation of emergency managers sat in those briefs listening, and learning, this craft. In the days since his passing, the outpouring of tributes from these professionals is breaking the internet, filled with words like toughness, integrity, compassion and sacrifice.
Crisis managers will tell you that we live in dangerous times. For them, the crisis is not just some sped up version of normal daily life. It is fundamentally different, an alien place, where the normal rules of logic don’t apply.
Most people avoid thinking about crises but when they do, they often think that they are up to the challenge. These things happen in this life, they figure, and with a little luck and a lot of hard work, they will get through it. Once inside that parallel universe, though, that confidence is shattered; when those things that always worked for them stopped working and the people who were always there for them are gone. That is why God made emergency managers.
When families and children and seniors and individuals with access and functional needs are inevitably cast into the chaos of the crisis zone, NYCEM is there; answering the questions that nobody else will answer and solving the problems that no one else will solve.
Calvin Drayton did that for the City of New York for 23 years. And perhaps more importantly, he taught a generation of crisis managers how to do it too. That is his legacy; one for which New Yorkers should be eternally grateful
Lhota, the CFO and chief of staff at NYU Langone Health, is a former New York City deputy mayor. McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and is currently the chief of Emergency Management and Enterprise Resilience at NYU Langone.