Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Public Safety Answering Center in MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn. (credit: Edward Reed/Flickr)
NEW YORK (WCBS 880) - New York City has made a $2.1 billion improvement its 911 emergency call system.
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It puts, for the first time, the city’s 1,500 call takers and dispatchers in one place and upgrades its technology.
“911 call takers now receive, automatically, not only the address and telephone number of the caller, but also a digital map of the caller’s location,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Brooklyn center on Thursday.
So, whether the caller is at 42nd Street in Manhattan, at 42nd Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, or 42nd Street in Sunnyside, Queens, the call taker will know the difference.
The city is also constructing a backup system in the Bronx.
“With each having the capacity to support the city’s entire 911 operations in the event of a crisis,” said Bloomberg. “And this revel of redundancy will assure that, god-forbid, disaster were to strike one center, the second center would be able to seamlessly handle the city’s entire 911 emergency communications needs.”
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