Transforming the 911 call system — once a technological marvel — into a seamless, instantaneous emergency communication network is the city’s largest technology project — and also the most troubled.
With lives on the line, every moment every day, it is also the most critical.
That’s why First Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris was right to freeze the Emergency Communications Technology Project for a two-month study of its boondoggles and breakdowns.
The list of snafus is absurdly long. The Daily News’ Juan Gonzalez has chronicled many of them. But there are more, and they threaten to drive up costs by tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars and to add delay upon delay.
Combining police, fire and emergency medical service 911 systems has proven harder than it sounds because each has its own protocols, down to locating street addresses. Once upon a time, the new 911 was supposed to take five years to develop and cost $1.3 billion — the figures seeming to be generous allotments of time and money.
We are now at the 10-year mark, with costs topping $2 billion. This cannot be counted as one of the successes of the supposedly tech-savvy Bloomberg administration. Far from it.
Shorris said he called the time-out after reviewing projections that completing the project would take years more — meaning close to 15 years from start to finish. Who buys an essential life-safety technology that takes 15 years to deliver? Planned obsolescence doesn’t come close to describing it.
Last year, when the NYPD turned on its $48 million computer-aided dispatch system, or CAD, the rollout was plagued by lost calls and breakdowns. In one episode officially blamed on human error, there was a lag in getting an ambulance to 4-year-old Ariel Russo, who had been hit by a careening SUV on the Upper West Side.
For all of its complexities, the police CAD (which was a half-dozen years late) is but a small piece of a huge project. A FDNY/EMS CAD has yet to be activated.
There are two large buildings, a primary one in downtown Brooklyn and giant backup still under construction in the Bronx. There are radio networks that are supposed to make sure that police and fire are linked. There is a balky phone system (five years late) for receiving calls that has sometimes failed to locate calls’ origins.
Add in command centers, dispatchers, satellite locators in all FDNY rigs and even a unified city map so that responders go to the same place.
Oh, and $60 million a year for consultants who are supposed to keep the whole thing running.
Under Bloomberg, all of this lived within the mayor’s office. Shorris has assigned incoming Commissioner Anne Roest of the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications to chart a path out of the mess. Her first day of work is Monday. She is going to be busy — and she’d better be damn good.
