Say something horrible happens. Say you’re bleeding profusely or you’re feeling significant chest pain – you call 911, right? That number has been ingrained into us almost as soon as we learn how to use a phone – and for good reason. It saves lives.
But, apparently, we now live in a city that shelled out $88 million for a 911 system that crashes constantly – forcing operators to use pen and paper to respond to calls – and routinely drops or misdirects calls. A 4-year-old girl whose family is from Middle Village died when a car hit her while she was walking to school with her grandmother in Manhattan, and her parents are suing the city because they said the 911 system failed and didn’t get an ambulance in time to their daughter.
According to a report by the New York Post, the system crashed at least nine times in one week. Another report surfaced that a crash victim was left on a highway for almost two hours because of glitches in the system.
A number of emergency workers in Queens have told this paper that calls are frequently misdirected, with, for example, 911 calls meant for Bayside being sent to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Bayside and Bay Ridge? We don’t think we need to tell you that they’re nowhere near each other.
And this week, we wrote about a man from Tudor Village who had to wait between 20 and 25 minutes for an ambulance after he slipped and cracked his head on the ground.
Twenty to 25 minutes? Like his neighbor said, what if he had been having a heart attack? This is most certainly a life or death issue, and it is beyond unacceptable that situations like this continue to happen.
No matter how much money the city spent on this new system, or how much Hizzoner hates to admit that he is wrong, this is not the time to be cheap – or arrogant.
Because if the city doesn’t make serious changes – and more changes than adding some people as operators – there will be more deaths. There will be more parents having to bury their children. There will be family members who will never again see grandparents – and all because the largest city in the entire United States couldn’t get its act together.
This has nothing to do with our amazing emergency responders who spend their days, and nights, fighting to ensure people stay alive. They deserve all our respect, and, given the normal stress they are under, what must it be like now? How much more burnt out will they be feeling?
Mr. Bloomberg, your unwillingness to overhaul this system will likely result in these individuals eventually feeling as though they cannot do what they love to do anymore.
When a member of the FDNY arrived to take care of the Tudor Village man who had fallen, he said he had come from Woodside. Another emergency responder who showed up not long after that said he was coming from Corona.
What?
Were there really no ambulances in Howard Beach, Ozone Park, Richmond Hill or Woodhaven? That’s hard to believe. Or were they all out in far-away corners of the borough after being sent on a wild goose chase by this allegedly “state-of-the-art” 911 system?
