No wonder the city’s new emergency response system is plagued by dangerous delays.
Beyond repeated technical glitches, civilian 911 call takers are so overwhelmed by their workload that they’re dropping like flies, breaking down mentally and physically after working repeated 16 hour shifts, The Post has learned.
“They don’t have enough people. The people there are getting sick from the stress of it and lack of sleep. At the end of our shifts, we’re exhausted, out of it. People are falling apart, getting physically sick. It’s unhealthy,” a veteran call taker complained to The Post.
The OT is mandatory, exhausting the workers and disrupting their lives, the call taker said.
“When someone calls in sick, they hold someone else. They don’t let you leave. You can’t get home to your family. We’re doing 16-hour shifts three days in a row,” the source said.
Technical glitches in the $88 million CAD system (short for computer-aided dispatch) — which went live on May 29 — also take a heavy toll.
The system is slow spitting out “job numbers,” which the call takers need to give to dispatchers before cops, firefighters or ambulances can be sent out, wasting precious minutes.
“On one of the calls, it took CAD three minutes to give me a job number. While I was waiting, the dispatcher kept shouting, ‘What’s the job number? What’s the job number?’ There was nothing I could do. It wasn’t frozen or down. It just took that long to give that one bit of information,” the source said.
Rookies are dropping out of training classes because of the stress, the caller added. “We just had a class of 50, and 15 to 20 people dropped out right in the middle,” the source said.
Even some veterans are calling it a career.
“It’s been so bad with the new system, old-timers are quitting. They can’t take it anymore. They can’t deal with the new CAD,” the source said.
The Post reported Thursday that dispatchers had to use pen, paper and radios to take down calls and dispatch ambulances when the system crashed.
But FDNY Commissioner Sal Cassano insisted yesterday that the trouble is temporary and that new backup servers should prevent further snafus.
“Today, we’re up and running. We have a redundancy now. Three of our four servers are up. We’re working on getting the fourth server up and running,” he said at an FDNY promotion ceremony in Brooklyn.
Cassano defended emergency-response reliability.
“This is the eighth time the system has gone down since 2005. In the last eight years, it’s gone down for a total of eight hours,” he said.