FLASHBACK
How The Post broke the story. (
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Poor planning led the city’s 911 call center to be woefully understaffed when Hurricane Sandy hit, emergency services sources told The Post yesterday, as elected officials demanded Mayor Bloomberg get to the bottom of the system’s failures.
As The Post revealed on Monday, callers to 911 were met with busy signals, recorded messages and ill-prepared operators during the Oct. 29 storm, which ravaged swaths of the city and led to 43 deaths.
“They had unmanned positions,” said Faye Smyth, president of the fire dispatchers union. “That answers the question about why people would be getting recordings when they called.”
Sources said that there was little prestorm planning.
“You have to set up schedules. You have to go to 12-hour shifts or 18-hour shifts. Then you have to get the next shift in,” one source said. “They didn’t do any of that. And here you have the whole subway system shut down and you knew about it in advance.”
The source added the officials were supposed to make transportation arrangements for the dispatchers, but didn’t follow through.
A second source summed up the chaos callers faced as simply: “They didn’t have enough bodies in the chairs.”
Despite the failures, Mayor Bloomberg has insisted the 911 system, which has been subject to an overbudget $2 billion overhaul, “functioned perfectly.”
The NYPD said it provided shuttles for some dispatchers, and many slept in the office.
“The 911 operators walked to police stations to get to work, worked long hours when they got there, and dealt with call volume that was 10 times greater than usual at some points — not to mention the catastrophic losses suffered by operators residing in storm-affected areas but who showed up for work,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
But, elected officials were not satisfied with these explanations.
“By shining a light on the scope of this breakdown, The Post did the city a real service,” said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “When the city sees a crisis like a storm approaching, it has to assign the personnel and resources necessary to protect our people.”
De Blasio and Councilman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Queens), chairwoman of the fire and criminal justice committee, asked Bloomberg to investigate what went wrong.
“This is not the mark of a perfectly-run system,” they wrote, mocking Bloomberg’s assertion.
“Failure to plan caused the system to fail, just as it failed during the December 2010 blizzard,” they wrote. “The city must seriously analyze the system’s shortcomings and seek answers that will help us better prepare for future disasters.”