New York City’s $2 billion new 911 emergency system seems to work great — except, maybe, in emergencies.
In emergencies like Sandy, to be specific.
The Post’s Josh Margolin reported yesterday that the city redundantly dispatched first responders during the storm — sowing confusion and diverting resources needed for other emergencies.
That, to put it mildly, is not how a 911 system is supposed to work.
Speed matters in emergencies, after all.
It’s also worrisome, given that so much money was spent — and because the city has run into so many problems with other technologically based “upgrades” meant to “streamline” bureaucracy.
Under the new 911 system, it seems, operators dispatch emergency personnel without first determining whether a call for that incident has already been fielded — though the city denies that.
On the day the storm hit, Margolin reports, some 7,377 calls swamped the FDNY, coming in at some 10 times the normal rate.
But only 1,945 of them were true emergencies. The rest: duplicates of earlier calls.
Yet officials apparently hadn’t realized some were repeats until after additional resources were dispatched. Oops.
True, to some degree, this may reflect a trade-off: Time spent figuring out if a call is a duplicate could mean life or death.
“Now, when you call 911 to report a fire, you will speak to only one call-taker,” Mayor Bloomberg said in 2009, as he introduced the system. “By cutting out the middle-man . . . we will shorten the time it takes for the Fire Department to begin its response to emergencies.”
Perhaps. But it might also lead to fire trucks zooming down streets unnecessarily, even when they’re needed elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the city has run into its share of glitches with other new technology-based systems. The most famous: the $700 million CityTime payroll system, which was riddled with fraud.
Last week, The Post reported the cost of another project, the New York City Automated Personnel System, had grown again, this time to $377 million, from an original price tag of $66 million a decade ago.
For sums like that, “upgrades” should make things better, no?
Well, so you’d think.