New York City’s 911 operators are now able to give callers details about emergency events.
That reverses what the Sept. 11 Commission determined were flaws in the 911 system that a decade ago denied people inside the burning World Trade Center potentially lifesaving information.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials formally launched a new $680 million 911 call center today.
The new technology at the center will give more information to the call takers, allowing officials to feed them information about emergencies and automatically showing them a map of the location of each caller.
In 2004, the federal commission concluded that on 9/11 the phone system’s operators were unaware that fire chiefs were evacuating the doomed twin towers because the city had no way of relaying that information.