DISASTROUS: Diane Hudson says she called 911 several times during Sandy to get help to her disabled friend, David Gotthelf (above), 72, who was trapped by rapidly rising floodwaters in his Rockaway Park home. She found Gotthelf drowned the next morning. (Gregory P. Mango)
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The city’s 911 call system failed the most vulnerable New Yorkers caught in Sandy’s wrath, say survivors, some of whom lost loved ones in the storm.
Among their shocking claims:
* 911 calls rang and rang unanswered or were greeted by woefully unprepared operators.
* Dispatchers from the police, fire and ambulance services feuded with one another.
* At times, operators tried to pawn off calls to the city’s 311 non-emergency hot line.
“They obviously weren’t trained for this kind of situation. . . . They’re kind of reading from a script,” fumed Diane Hudson, 45, who desperately tried to help her friend David Gotthelf, an elderly man afflicted with cerebral palsy, before he drowned in his Rockaway Park home.
Gotthelf, 72, had called Hudson, who lives in another building in the same evacuation zone, when he couldn’t get through to 911. Water was rushing into his home.
“The first hour or so, I got a busy signal. When [I was] finally able to get through to 911, it would ring for three or four minutes,” Hudson said. “One time, they sent [me] to a dispatcher who called me back and ended up being in The Bronx.”
She kept calling 911. At one point, she was transferred to Emergency Medical Services, which coordinates ambulances and told her they don’t do rescues.
“I told them my friend who’s disabled was stuck in his apartment, and I hadn’t spoken to him in hours. They said, ‘We can’t really help you because it’s not a medical emergency.’ They told me to call 311,” she said.
A dispatcher told her Gotthelf was “in our system, but right now, [your] best option for helping is call 311,” she said.
Hudson called 911 and 311 several more times through the evening and into the early morning until her cellphone battery died.
No responders ever made it to Gotthelf’s home.
The next morning, Hudson found her friend dead.
There were 20,000 calls per hour when Sandy hit Oct. 29, and the city’s 1,400 911 dispatchers were overwhelmed despite official claims that they could handle 50,000 calls an hour. The 911 system typically handles 30,000 calls a day.
Some operators scolded callers for not evacuating, callers said.
A consultant this year found the FDNY and NYPD’s insistence on having their own dispatchers had created a situation in which operators wasted “time asking duplicative questions and taking identical actions for the same 911 caller.”
That exact problem happened on many calls during Sandy.
In 2009, the city allocated approximately $1 billion to overhaul the 911 system, including building a $680 million call center. The system ultimately cost $2 billion.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne defended the handling of the calls.
“Instead of holding on as instructed by a recording during these peaks, callers hung up and redialed even through the recording cautioned against doing so because it put repeat callers back at the bottom of the queue and furthered overall delays,” he said. “Despite repeated requests to the public to use 311 for non-emergencies, many still used 911 for non-life-threatening situations.”