Big changes are coming to the city’s problem-plagued 911 system.
Mayor Bloomberg is putting the finishing touches on a package of fixes to his centerpiece, $2 billion project, which has become a financial and public-safety morass, The Post has learned.
Within the next month, Hizzoner is going to announce a new command structure over the system and, most importantly, the elimination of the technological wall that has stymied emergency-response times.
With the current system, all 911 calls come to the NYPD, and if the emergency involves a fire or ambulance, there can be delays in transferring the call to the FDNY for help.
In addition, if two people call 911 to report the same fire, two fire trucks are sent out — one to answer each call — a wasteful duplication of services.
While NYPD bosses have long objected to plugging the FDNY into their system, claiming that the security of the police network would be compromised if fire staff had access to it, Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said those problems have now been worked out thanks to a technology upgrade.
On a floor-by-floor tour of the city’s new $650 million 911 call center being built in The Bronx, Holloway said he and his team have been working on the changes since spring — when The Post revealed the disturbing findings of the mayor’s consultants, who said the new system became a boondoggle largely because of poor planning and feuding between the NYPD and FDNY.
“The logical conclusion is to integrate the system into a single physical network,” Holloway told The Post. “This will make the call-taking and dispatch process more efficient and improve public safety.”
The shortcomings of 911 have been glaring over the past decade. The system failed during the 9/11 attacks and then again during the 2010 blizzard.
There were similar problems last fall as Hurricane Sandy crippled much of the city. Officials blamed poor planning that left call centers understaffed.
Although some of the new changes to the 911 system may cost money at the start, “we’ll actually save money because there’s less hardware” in the long run, said Bruce Gaskey, chief of emergency communications.