Where's The Accountability For Bloomberg? (UPDATED)

Juan Gonzalez in the DN:

It's happened again.

For the second time in two days, computers running a newly installed dispatch system at the city’s main 911 center in Brooklyn crashed on Thursday afternoon.

The latest mishap began at 12:09 p.m. and lasted intermittently for nearly an hour. As with a similar 16-minute crash that occurred Wednesday, NYPD telephone operators could still receive emergency telephone calls, but they were forced to fill out all information manually on slips of paper because their computer terminals would not work.

The operators then handed those slips to runners who rushed them over to EMS and police radio dispatchers working from different rooms at the same call center.

“This definitely caused delays in our emergency response time,” one veteran operator told the Daily News. “A job that we’d normally input in 30 seconds took up to five minutes.”

At one point during the crash, EMS dispatchers had a backlog of 75 emergency jobs waiting for ambulances to be assigned, one EMS dispatcher told The News.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly conceded shortly after the crash began that “something went amiss,” despite the new system having been “tested now for six months” before its rollout early Wednesday morning.

Kelly initially told reporters that Thursday’s crash lasted for only six minutes, but when he spoke the problem had not been fully brought under control.

According to several 911 operators and supervisors, the system did recover briefly around 12:24 p.m., but it quickly crashed again and remained down until 1:02 p.m.

City Hall spokesman John McCarthy sought to play down this latest snafu.

“The replacement of any large complex system invariably will have kinks that need to be worked out during the cutover period,” McCarthy said.

Any private sector employee understands that a new computer system inevitably bring bugs with it. But in the case of a life-and-death operation like 911, you expect fewer errors before launching a new program.

“Why, for example, did they decide to roll this out in the middle of summer?” one veteran operator asked. “We’re heading into a heat wave, and we all know that hot weather brings a huge spike in emergency calls."

The new system, known as ICAD, was designed by Alabama-based Intergraph Corp. Like virtually every part of Mayor Bloomberg’s massive $2 billion modernization of the 911 system, it has been dogged by cost overruns and delays.

Intergraph was hired in 2008 after a previous vendor, Hewlett-Packard, failed to deliver a new dispatch system. Since then, the original $73 million contract for ICAD has already ballooned to $88 million.

Let’s hope the Intergraph technicians can figure out fast why the system they rigorously tested for six months has crashed twice in two days.

If not, New Yorkers and our emergency service workers are facing a long hot summer.

We'll spend a lot of time examining the new teacher evaluation system imposed upon NYC teachers by NYSED Commissioner/rookie teacher John King today.

But what could be more important than the 911 call system and why aren't we talking about how it is that the genius Bloomberg has spent over $2 billion dollars on a system redo and this is the best he can do?

How many people die if this system goes down during a major catastrophe?

We have had two major storms in the last two years - Irene and Sandy.

What happens with this vaunted new Bloomberg 911 system if we get another storm like that?

I'm so sick of the bullshit in the media about holding teachers accountable blah blah blah when we officials like Mike Bloomberg who have spent over $2 billion for a 911 system that DOES NOT WORK.

If the media weren't on the Bloomberg payroll (or the Murdoch payroll or the Zuckerman payroll or the Gates payroll or hoping to get on the Bloomberg payroll before their own news outlet gets shut down) maybe we would see some accountability for our mayor.

But of course we have a company media covering a mayor they either work for or hope to work for, so instead we get stories about how important it is to hold teachers accountable with student test scores.

Meanwhile the 911 system goes down two days in a row and on one of those days, an ordinary day with no serious emergency, the city has a backlog of 75 calls and they're running back and forth between dispatchers with slips of paper.

Where's the accountability for this?

UPDATE - 7:30:  The 911 system went down for a third time on Friday, according to the NY Post.  Bloomberg downplayed the problems on his radio program:

The city’s brand-new 911 system went down yesterday for a half hour — the third day in a row it was riddled with glitches.

The failure brought down the EMS computer system, as well as the terminals in the ambulances, a source said.

“What happens if it goes down? We go back to the caveman days,” said an FDNY source.

“You have to write everything down on paper or index card.”

It was unclear how many calls it affected, but it came “in the beginning of the summer, where call volume can skyrocket at any time,” the source said.

“I hope that these incidents don’t occur on days where we have seriously high call volumes, because it may affect services.”

The snafu came just hours after Mayor Bloomberg downplayed the severity of the glitches.

“I mean, it works. It has some bugs in it. All new systems have,” he said on his weekly radio show.

“We’ve got a backup system. And, you know, you wish you didn’t have bugs, but that’s not the real world.”

The system crashed for six minutes Thursday and failed for hours Wednesday night, as the NYPD changed over from its old system.

A disaster waiting to happen - but Mike says the system "works" despite it's going down for hours on Wednesday, six minutes on Thursday and 30 minutes on Friday.