Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 29 Apr 91 04:29:52 GMT From: Matt Blaze Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: New Phone Numbers for NYC Fire Department Message-ID: Organization: Princeton University, Dept. of Computer Science Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 316, Message 11 of 12 Lines: 66 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]