FDNY Dispatch System Crashes

The FDNY’s emergency-dispatch system crashed for almost two hours Monday – leaving communications workers scrambling to jot down notes with pen and paper before calling out to ambulance teams, authorities said.

The glitch started around 2:15 p.m., when fire officials say the communication system, which coordinates which ambulances get sent to which jobs, went down. It was back up and running by 4:05 p.m., sources said.

Without the system, call-takers write down notes and hand the paper to a dispatcher. Dispatchers then assign the jobs to units in the field. It’s essentially the way calls were handled before the department moved to a modern computerized system.

Two 4-year-old half-siblings died in their Far Rockaway home in a fire after the FDNY’s emergency-dispatch system crashed in April.