14 DAY TRIAL // Officials have admitted that the death of a 4-year-old girl as a result of a delayed response by emergency operators is a human error.
According to New York City Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano quoted by ABC News, Ariel Russo was the victim of a car crash.
She was hit by a motorist in a hit-and-run, a police chase ensued, and the girl succumbed to her injuries in part because the ambulance service was late arriving at the scene.
The ambulance was only dispatched three to four minutes after the message about the accident was received.
The call showed up on the FDNY alert screen, but operators failed to respond to the signal and act upon it in a timely manner.
“They just failed to read the screen. [...] We’ll deal with that,” Cassano says.
“It wasn’t picked up by the person that should have been reading that screen,” he explains.
The 911 system in New York City has incurred several malfunctions within the last month, including four breakdown throughout the last week alone.
“It has some bugs in it. all new systems have. […] You wish you didn’t have bugs but that is not the real world,” mayor Bloomberg has stated in a press conference.
On May 29, the police-dispatch system crashed for 11 minutes leaving operators unable to communicate automatically with police, fire or EMS operators.
Consultants employed by the city outlines possible problems that the new 911 system would cause. The issues were included in a report which was submitted to Mayor Bloomberg’s office.
“Development efforts continue with little to no cross-agency coordination or common vision, resulting in excessive development costs, schedule delays and interface complexity,” it reads.
“Operational improvements to processes haven’t been established,” it also stated, two years before the Ariel Russo fiasco.