By Jim Dwyer And Edward Wyatt, The New York Times
One summer day in 1968, Mayor John V. Lindsay, declaring that he was at “perhaps the most important event of my administration,” picked up a telephone at police headquarters and made a ceremonial call to a three-digit number, 911. The call did not go through, so the mayor dialed again. Then again. Finally, someone realized he was using an inside phone line, and pushed a button. With that, the mayor managed to complete the call, and officially launch the city’s 911 line.
Last year, New Yorkers dialed 911 an average of 23 times every minute, using a simple phone number now chiseled into public vocabulary, habit and expectation. Yet the 911 operation that grew since Mr. Lindsay made those first calls is less a seamless network of police, fire and ambulance services than a brittle contraption - fragmented, uncoordinated, and in parts, dangerously obsolete and vulnerable, according to city and emergency response officials.
Now, with little attention, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has ordered a major overhaul of 911 in hope of making it faster, smarter and safer. New Yorkers have been paying telephone surcharges to improve 911 since 1992, but audits, legislative investigations and mayoral studies all have come to the same conclusion: the city has little to show for the money from those charges, which now totals $281 million.
Callers to 911 often must provide the same details twice, an exercise in delay that can be followed by a deluge of rescuers, even when only a few are needed. Sending too many people saps resources that may be needed elsewhere, according to a mayoral task force, but no single person or computer tracks all the help available in a neighborhood.
Police computers automatically display the addresses of 911 callers, an unremarkable function in the digital age. Fire dispatchers, however, cannot see that information. Strict divisions of turf among the emergency agencies, dating to the 19th century, endure in the incompatible dispatch systems of the 21st.
Not only do the emergency agencies have separate dispatchers using different computers, but they also work in buildings miles apart. So isolated are the dispatchers - geographically, technologically and managerially - that they must, at times, dial 911 themselves to communicate across agency lines.
“If the fire dispatchers need to contact the Police Department, they actually have to dial back into 911,” said Lawrence Knafo, first deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
With each chamber of the 911 system that a call passes through, the chances for failure multiply, the mayor’s task force has found. The structure creates risks that some or all of the system could shut down, the officials say, as was the case last month, when callers from Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island could not reach 911 for two hours.
Mr. Bloomberg plans to consolidate the city’s eight dispatching operations physically and virtually, bringing all the services into two identical centers working on the same computer system. This is an undertaking of vast technical complexity and political delicacy that frustrated Mr. Bloomberg’s immediate predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who tried versions of it during his eight years in office.
Launching 911 may have been among the most important events of Mr. Lindsay’s administration; fixing it could prove one of the most difficult of Mr. Bloomberg’s.
“The world continues to get more complicated, but responding to emergencies quickly and with the right resources still makes the difference when lives are at risk,” Mr. Bloomberg said through a spokesman. “So whatever we can do to integrate and streamline our dispatch systems will only protect the people of New York.”
No one disputes that 911 is a rickety gateway, but it now handles roughly 12 million calls a year. The system serves powerful forces on both ends of the phone line: the people who dial in seeking help, and the city’s public safety agencies, which employ about 60,000 people.
“On its face, this is the most sensible idea,” Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said. “It will centralize the services and give us backup in case something happens.”
A vocal critic of the approach, however, is David Rosenzweig, a veteran fire dispatcher and the president of the dispatchers’ 170-member union. He contends that the plans will make matters worse and suggested that the mayor wanted a ribbon-cutting on a public safety project before next year’s election.
“The system is not configured to provide firehouses with the information that they get now,” he said. “It most likely will increase the response time and jeopardize lives.”
That will not happen, said the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Gino P. Menchini, who is overseeing the consolidation. “We’re not going to introduce risks or vulnerabilities,” he said. “If David is saying this is a political thing, I don’t think he’s right.”
Mr. Menchini said he was conscious of the strengths and expertise on which the current 911 operation rests, but that the shortcomings were patent. He and his senior aide, Mr. Knafo, outlined the path a typical call followed to report a heart attack.
At the main 911 center in downtown Brooklyn, a police operator asks the location of the emergency, its nature and the name of the person reporting it. The call is then transferred to the Emergency Medical Service in another building. There, a second operator swaps badge information with the first one, once again solicits basic information from the caller, then tries to determine how serious the problem is. The E.M.S. operator writes a computer message to an E.M.S. dispatcher, who usually sends two ambulances, one staffed with a crew capable of advanced life support techniques. (If the patient is not seriously ill, the advanced crew can leave.)
In the meantime, a message from the original police operator prompts the dispatch of a car with two officers. They can help gain entry to a home.
The E.M.S. operator also alerts the Fire Department, which often has companies available for quick response. Each engine carries five firefighters trained in emergency first aid. That would bring 11 people from three agencies to the scene, Mr. Knafo said. And those 11 might be joined by a police sergeant with a driver, an E.M.S. supervisor, or a pair of officers from the police Emergency Service Unit. A volunteer ambulance corps could also respond.
Although the Fire Department took control of the Emergency Medical Service in 1996, the two agencies still work on different dispatch computers. The Fire Department system was developed in the 1970’s and remains essentially unchanged; in 1999, the department aborted a planned upgrade after investing seven years and at least $8 million, saying that it had been unable to integrate its system with that of the E.M.S.
During the same time, the Police Department spent $13 million on a computer-assisted dispatch system, but it, too, was never installed after delays and disputes with its contractor. Another Police Department plan, to build a duplicate 911 center, was promised by the Giuliani administration but not delivered.
A 911 surtax on phone bills, which began in 1992 at 35 cents and increased to $1 last year, has raised $281 million, according to a senior analyst with the city’s Independent Budget Office, Bernard O’Brien. Of that, $115 million has been spent so far on 911-related capital projects. Even so, New York, once a pioneer in 911, lags behind Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles in its technology.
Until 1996, the Chicago system closely resembled New York’s, with dispatchers based in three locations and unable to share information. Now, all the dispatchers work in a 15,000-square-foot room on a common computer system that can instantly display information in police cars and fire trucks. The operation is run by one city agency rather than by the individual uniformed services.
In New York, Mr. Bloomberg moved to unify the system when he realized that the city’s public safety agencies had each made separate proposals to improve their dispatching systems, at costs that would reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Mr. Menchini. He likened the proposals to “paving the cow path,” or simply building a new road atop an old one, with no consideration of alternative routes. The new investments would have fortified the isolation of the agencies for years to come.
“The mayor was really troubled that there was no move into integration and interoperability,” Mr. Menchini said. “You have systems that reflect the way things always have been done, not the one that might make sense for the 21st century.”
Yet Mr. Rosenzweig contends that the system’s problems could be solved for much less than what the city will spend, which he suggests will approach $1 billion.
A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg did not dispute the billion dollar estimate, but said hard numbers were not available. In any case, Mr. Menchini says, the proposals from the individual agencies, providing no integration, are likely to cost the same or more than the new approach.
Last spring the mayor assigned Mr. Menchini, who oversaw the creation of the city’s 311 number for non-emergency calls, to broker a master plan.
Two events accelerated the work. The first was the August blackout, which showed that uncoordinated efforts delayed response, especially when calls overloaded 911, according to a report prepared for the mayor. The second event was the loss of the 911 system to parts of the city on March 26, when a Verizon technician mistakenly reprogrammed a telephone exchange in Brooklyn. For about two hours, people calling 911 in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island were met with a busy signal.
Mr. Menchini said other vulnerabilities exist because of the route that calls follow, from the two 911 centers operated by the Police Department in Lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, then back out to dispatchers for each agency.
The fire dispatchers have bases in all five boroughs; E.M.S. has one in downtown Brooklyn. As calls are routed between those points, they pass through miles of cable and multiple switches, each a potential “point of failure,” Mr. Menchini said.
Mr. Rosenzweig argues that by dispersing the system so widely, the city has backups in case disaster strikes in one area. The fire dispatch centers are directly linked to street fire alarm boxes, and those worked during the 911 failure. The only serious fire during those two hours was reported through a street alarm box.
Under a consolidated 911 system, Mr. Menchini said, the city is likely to preserve fire alarm boxes, and he says that the duplicate call center will be in a secure facility, on a separate power grid, and with easy access to mass transit for employees.
Some city officials see Mr. Rosenzweig’s criticisms as reflecting his concern that the favorable position his union members enjoy could be jeopardized. Fire dispatchers work at bases in city parks, are the highest paid, but get the fewest calls.
True, Mr. Rosenzweig says, but he notes that the Fire Department provides the quickest response, arriving five minutes or less 97 percent of the time, and that its dispatchers pass a stringent civil service test. The E.M.S. dispatchers are emergency medical technicians who stay on the phone and provide first aid instructions until help arrives. The people with the highest work load - the operators who take the 911 calls - work for the Police Department and are the lowest paid of the system employees.
