Chair De La Rosa opens with urgency of 911 and the August 18 outage
Chair De La Rosa frames the hearing around the FDNY EMS Local 2507 reminder that clinical death begins after four minutes. She describes the August 18 outage where Bronx PSAC 2 call takers could not hear callers for approximately seven hours, affecting about 1,700 calls, with as many as 400 callers never connected. She attributes the cause to a Motorola Solutions software update.
Good morning and welcome to our hearing.
I am Councilmember Carmen De La Rosa and I am the Chair of the Committee on Technology.
I'm happy to be joined by my colleagues, Chair Areola, Chair Feliz, and Chair Brewer, in holding this joint hearing on examining New York City's 911 emergency system outage.
I want to begin with the words of FDNY EMS Local 2507, delivered before this Council at a similar hearing.
Clinical death begins after four minutes.
Biological death begins after six minutes.
And as Local 2507 reminds us, in this modern era, emergency systems are designed to work diligently in seconds because when a life is on the line, there is no time to waste, and every minute counts.
However, in the early mornings of August 18th, for approximately seven hours, a part of New York City's 911 system failed as call takers at the Bronx Public Safety Answering Center 2 could not hear callers.
According to the New York Times, approximately 1,700 calls were affected and as many as 400 callers had not been connected with a 911 at all.
New Yorkers were neither informed about the outage nor instructed to text 911 or call back while it was happening.
Mayor Mamdani has since stated that the cost was a software
update by OTI's vendor, Motorola Solutions.
Ironically, Motorola tells its public safety customers on its website, when someone calls 911, every second counts.
And if something is broken, we need to fix it and not tomorrow.