Winston Lawrence <larryw@dorsai.com> (04/23/91)
In the HELLO pamphlet that NYNEX sends with its phone bill came the following: To report a fire in New York City, call: (212) 999-2222 (Manhattan), (212) 999-3333 (Bronx), (718) 999-4444 (Brooklyn), (718) 999-5555 (Queens), and (718) 999-6666 for Staten Island. or call 911. The 999 prefix immediately caught my eye as this is (or was) the number that every schoolkid and up in London knew as the emergency services number. Is this a new variation on 911 being started up here? When I tried 999-xxxx the call was immediately halted with a recording saying that the number was incorrectly dialed (this is from Long Island area code 516). Dialing only three digits of any other combination results in a looong timeout.
Ed_Greenberg@3mail.3com.com (04/25/91)
My GUESS (and it's only a guess) is that the 911 system in New York City is so badly overloaded with police traffic that they have to route fire traffic another way. "You have reached nine-one-one. To report a crime, press 1, to report a fire, press 2...."
Carl Moore (VLD/VMB) <cmoore@brl.mil> (04/25/91)
999 in NYC used to have recorded messages like Dial-a-Joke. This was circa 1976.
Matt Blaze <mab@duvel.princeton.edu> (04/29/91)
Ed_Greenberg@3mail.3com.com writes: > My GUESS (and it's only a guess) is that the 911 system in New York > City is so badly overloaded with police traffic that they have to > route fire traffic another way. > "You have reached nine-one-one. To report a crime, press 1, to report > a fire, press 2...." Well, kind of. My recollection (based on my experience as a NYC paramedic eight years ago) is that the NYC 911 system is answered by a police ACD operator. They have a pool of operators for each of the five boroughs, but all calls are answered in the same physical location (1 Police Plaza), which also has all the police radio dispatchers. No problem if you are calling for just police help. The fire department, on the other hand, is not completely centralized. Each borough has its own central office, which houses the radio dispatchers, the cables from the street alarm boxes and from each firehouse, and so on. The fire central offices, by the way, are all located in city parks, on the assumption that if there is a really big fire, they will be isoloated and less likely to themselves burn down. If you call 911 to report a fire, the police operator has to figure out that you are calling about a fire, and places a 'three-way call' via a leased-line to a fire department dispatcher in the appropriate borough. Then you have to repeat the location information to the fire operator again, wasting lots of time. The police operators are not as well trained to handle fire calls, which is why they do it this way. So it's always faster to just call the fire department directly. The new numbers are certainly easier to remember (although I still remember the old Manhattan number: 628-2900), and I assume that the new numbers will not require you to drop a quarter into a pay phone to call them, as the old numbers did. By the way, the same thing is (or was eight years ago, at least) also true for emergency medical service (EMS) calls: first you get the police at 911, and then they connect you to the EMS dispatcher after they figure out that you need an ambulance. I don't recall whether EMS has a direct number for the public to call without going through the police first; at least when I worked there, we kind of liked having the cops show up at all our calls. matt [Moderator's Note: When Chicago converted to 911 many years ago from the decades-old POLice-1313 and FIRe-1313 system, there was quite a bit of bickering from the FD brass about delays in answering calls. Even after 911 was cut in, fire continued running parallel for another year. Where calls to POLice were trapped at each central office and delivered to the police dispatchers on various-1313, to identify the neighborhood originating the call, fire calls were only sent one of two ways: everything north of 39th Street went to DEArborn-1313 at the City Hall Fire Alarm Office. Central offices south of 39th Street sent their fire calls to Englewood Fire Alarm at TRIangle-0002. (I never could figure that one out ...). Prior to 911 -- the early seventies here -- fire fighters, paramedics and police officers were being sent on about a hundred phalse alarms daily. When the fire brass found how well 911 served to identify people who do that sort of thing, they quickly swallowed their pride and agreed to let the police answer their calls. PAT]
roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (04/29/91)
Ed_Greenberg@3mail.3com.com writes: > My GUESS (and it's only a guess) is that the 911 system in New York > City is so badly overloaded with police traffic that they have to > route fire traffic another way. Why not just add more operators, lines, etc? No, my guess is that it's political (what in New York isn't?). The NYPD and NYFD have a long standing tradition of feuding with each other. Various mayors have attempted, without much success, to mediate the disputes. NYPD claims they have jurisdiction over everthing that's not a fire, while the NYFD points out that since they have all sorts of fancy rescue gear, they should be the ones to cut people out of crushed cars, go scuba diving to get bodies out of the rivers, etc, etc. They also fight about which department is "in charge" of an emergency scene where officers from both departments have responded (have a Fire Marshal give orders to a policeman at a fire scene? About as likely has having American troops under Saudi commanders!) To bring this somewhat back to telecom issues, the radios they have are unable to communicate with each other. I believe the only way a policeman can get fire equipment to a scene is to call 911, and vice versa; this also extends, by-the-way, to the transit cops; they can't talk with the regular cops, and are also always having turf wars. Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
news@cbnewse.att.com (04/30/91)
Well, I guess if I don't know the emergency numbers for the town I'm in I just dial 0 for operator (except if I'm in an office building with it's own internal corporate phone system ... then all bets are off.)
dts@uunet.uu.net> (05/05/91)
A previous poster asks why New York wouldn't simply hire more 911 operators. I have a good story about this. Many years ago (late 70's) I spent a summer at the Polytechnic Institute of N.Y. (in Brooklyn). i]One of the professors for the summer program I attended specialized in using discrete modeling to analyze problems. We were there learning how to do this, using tools such as GPSS. The City had retained him to analyze the 911 service back then to determine how to improve response time. The City also asked IBM and AT&T for analyses at the same time. IBM, predictably, recommended that the solution was a new computer system. AT&T/New York Tel (the pre-breakup days), predictably recommended a new phone system. The professor did a proper study using discrete modeling, measuring time durations of operator tasks, frequency of calls, etc. and built a model. A carefully constructed model allows for controlled alteration of parameters (such as increasing the number of calls per hour, etc.) and gives very good predictions of the outcomes. His model showed that they needed a few more operators, and that the phones and computers in use were not the bottleneck. The City, of course, bought the phones and computers, and didn't hire any additional operators. Response time did not improve. When I lived in NYC, I always kept the phone numbers for the local police and fire stations near the phone. If there was an emergency you really didn't want to risk life and property on 911 response times. Daniel Senie UUCP: uunet!lectroid!peanut!dts Daniel Senie Consulting ARPA: peanut!dts@lectroid.sw.stratus.com 48 Elm Street CSRV: 74176,1347 Clinton, MA 01510 TEL.: 508 - 365 - 5352
eck@cmcl2.nyu.edu> (05/07/91)
In article <telecom11.338.1@eecs.nwu.edu> peanut!dts@uunet.uu.net (Daniel Senie) writes: > The City, of course, bought the phones and computers, and didn't hire > any additional operators. Response time did not improve. > When I lived in NYC, I always kept the phone numbers for the local > police and fire stations near the phone. If there was an emergency you > really didn't want to risk life and property on 911 response times. Recent experience bears out this observation. Last December, there was a fire in one of the Brooklyn subway tunnels. Literally dozens of citizens called 911 to request fire and ambulance assistance -- the primary danger being *extreme* smoke inhalation -- only to get no answer, to get cut off during a transfer, or to get the response that squad cars were on the way. When the proper emergency services were eventually dispatched, they were sent at first to a station on a *different* subway line. A number of passengers died, as I recall. There was a *HUGE* series of recriminations after the fact, and 911 is being (in theory) revamped, although NYC's present budget woes probably preclude any meaningful improvement. Mark Eckenwiler eck@panix.uucp ...!cmcl2!panix!eck