By Sarina Trangle
City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Glendale) says too many dispatchers on a 911 call may be bungling the response.
Shortly after the mayor announced his administration was halting a decade-old, $1.3 billion project to modernize the 911 system, Crowley took to the steps of City Hall with fire and EMS unions to call for immediate changes to one aspect of the overhaul called the unified call taker system.
Under UCT, 911 operators inquire about a caller’s location, emergency, name and number while electronically releasing information to FDNY and EMS dispatchers. Operators then connect FDNY or EMS dispatchers to the caller, who is then often asked to confirm responses before emergency responders are assigned.
A third exchange is sometimes required for reports of fires, according to Crowley. She said EMS is not typically dispatched until firefighters on the scene confirm the need for emergency medical care to dispatchers.
“It’s a simple solution that we could implement today at no cost if immediately when you know that it is a medical or fire emergency, that that dispatcher gets patched in,” she said during a joint meeting of the Council’s Fire and Criminal Justice, Public Safety and Technology committees last week. “Critical time gets wasted. Peoples’ lives are hanging in the balance.”
Crowley said the average amount of time elapsing from 911 getting a call about a life-threatening medical emergency and an ambulance arriving on scene is 9 minutes 22 seconds.
But when the call processing time is omitted, that drops to 6 minutes 45 seconds.
Mindy Tarlow, director of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office of operations, said the city is currently analyzing whether it would be more prudent for 911 operators to ask about the nature of emergencies before their location as is currently done.
De Blasio announced last month that he was halting for 60 days the so-called Emergency Communications Technology Project that ushered in UCT because the initiative had run several years behind and $1.3 billion over budget. He said no new contracts would be processed and no major procedural initiatives would be implemented during the review.
A week and a half later, de Blasio said his administration was beginning a more specific review of the personnel, process and technology involved in the 911 system.
Crowley has been suggesting that dispatchers automatically send an ambulance with a fire engine to the scene of reported flames since two 4-year-olds died in a Far Rockaway blaze this Easter. Crowley pointed out a city investigation found it took nearly seven minutes for an ambulance to respond to the fatal flames after the FDNY confirmed the emergency.
FDNY Chief of Communications Robert Boyce said there were too many false fire reports to tie up much-needed ambulances with routine FDNY responses.
“For every fire that there’s no injuries, we also have limited resources that we couldn’t send to a heart attack or to another medical emergency,” Boyce said at the hearing.
Reach reporter Sarina Trangle at 718-260-4546 or by e-mail at strangle@cnglocal.com.
