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Part of the city’s problem-plagued 911 system failed so many times yesterday that FDNY dispatchers were forced to revert to using pen and paper to jot down calls, while patrol cops were enlisted to take victims to hospitals.
Problems were so rife that by afternoon, cops were told to call their department’s own Emergency Service Unit for help, sources said. Otherwise, they were to transport victims to hospitals in their radio cars.
The move came less than a week after City Council Speaker Christine Quinn personally called Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to get an ambulance for a council intern who had collapsed in the heat at an outdoor event amid an emergency-service backlog.
The first of at least six glitches — apparently caused by old computer software that froze the Fire Department’s EMS dispatch system — lasted from 7:42 a.m. to 8:10 a.m., FDNY officials and sources said. EMS dispatchers had to juggle about 100 calls during the initial outage.
The second shutdown lasted about five minutes, officials said.
An FDNY official wouldn’t say when the second incident occurred, nor the number, time or duration of the subsequent glitches.
He said only that the total time that the computers were down throughout the day was roughly 90 minutes.
A dispatcher-union rep said the system crashed at least six times.
“It went down so many times, they can’t figure out the minutes themselves,’’ said Israel Miranda, president of the uniformed EMTs, Paramedics and Inspectors FDNY Local 2507.
“When they tried to boot it back up, it went down again.
“They went back to the pen and paper days,’’ he said of the workers. “[Operators taking the initial 911 call] have a runner pass the index card to a dispatcher, who has to figure out which borough and then relay it over the radio to the ambulances that are out there.
“Usually, it goes to the closest ambulance,’’ he said. But “they can’t tell where the ambulances are located at any given time because the system is down which has a GPS.” he said.
An FDNY rep said, “I have not been informed of any such difficulties,’’ when asked if the system shutdown affected patient care.
The FDNY blamed the glitches on 30-year-old software, which is set to be replaced in 2015.
The department said the old software is not part of the $88 million ICAD system launched in May at the city’s general 911 call-intake center.
Additional reporting by Sally Goldenberg, Kirstan Conley and Kate Sheehy