NYC 911 System To Hire 150 New Employees
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- New York City's 911 system will be getting a lot of new faces.
The city reportedly plans to hire another 150 people to staff call centers, WCBS 880's Marla Diamond reported Friday.
The NYPD was already set to hire the additional staff, but Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was granted approval this week for the new call-takers.
Emergency operators were forced to resort to pencil and paper to record calls several times this week, but Kelly defended the new system, CBS 2's Steve Langford reported.
"We think certainly the professionals we have in the NYPD, in the communications division, think this system is a quantum leap beyond the old system," Kelly said.
911 System To Hire 150 New Employees
The EMS 911 dispatch system went down for about 30 minutes Monday morning, the Fire Department said. That part of the system is from the 1980s and scheduled to be upgraded in 2015.
In all, the system crashed at least four times.
As WCBS 880′s Rich Lamb reported, administration sources said the failures mean details of a 911 medical call had to be hand-written on a slip and handed to an EMS dispatcher just a few feet away and in the same room.
The administration claimed there have been no delays as a result of the multiple failures.
Operators logged about 100 calls during the first outage.
The first failure was reported at 7:28 a.m. and lasted until 8:09 a.m. It was followed by more failures off and on throughout the day.
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