Another day, another failure.
The city’s beleaguered ambulance-response system crashed twice yesterday while computer geeks tried to diagnose the glitch that continues to snarl the system.
Dispatchers were forced to go back to using pen and paper to take down calls and using radios to dispatch ambulances.
The EMS CAD system first went down at about 3:30 a.m. yesterday, Fire Department sources said. EMS dispatchers received 23 calls during the five-minute outage.
Then, around 8 a.m., the system went on the fritz yet again, prompting computer techs to stop the diagnostic procedure.
During that period, dispatchers took down jobs from 55 callers.
“This EMS CAD System is 30 years old and has intermittently experienced interruptions,” the FDNY said in a statement. “A backup protocol for manual dispatch is in place to ensure all EMS calls are responded to, and the replacement of the old system is currently under way as part of the 911 overhaul.”
Israel Miranda, the president of FDNY Local 2507, thinks the issue is related to the new ICAD system that rolled out two months ago.
“The system continues to collapse. They continue to blame it on the EMS CAD because it’s old. We never had these problems before until they put in this new ICAD system,” he said.
On Monday, the same system crashed at least six times throughout the day.