The issue came to a head after a fire in August 2006, in a subway tunnel near the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge. The manager who was to be the liaison did not arrive until more than an hour after the fire began. Firefighters began evacuating a stranded D train, even though the third rail was still electrified; the firefighters were unaware that the subway command center was about to order that the train be moved.

A December 2006 report by the agency’s office of system safety concluded that passengers were unnecessarily put in danger, and it strongly urged changes in the way the agency dealt with emergencies. It suggested that the agency form a dedicated unit of responders whose main responsibility would be to go quickly to subway emergencies and act as a liaison with other agencies, passing information between them and the subway’s control center.

The result was the formation of the emergency response officer unit, which began operation in March 2008.

At most times, two members of the unit were on duty. During peak commuting periods, they were assigned to busy subway stations to be on hand to help with problems as they arose.

When it became clear the agency wanted to eliminate the response team, Cheryl Kennedy, the agency’s vice president of system safety, raised alarms.

“Our concern is that the improvements in response and communication that we have seen with the dedicated E.R.O. staff will be lost and we will return to the days of slow response and poor communication,” she wrote in a memo to Mr. Feil on Dec. 24, 2008, referring to the emergency response officer unit.

The memo noted that with the new unit in place, “the response time for the E.R.O.’s has been much less than it had previously been.” It also noted that police and fire officials had spoken “positively” about the unit’s performance.