911 Human Error Highlighted in Death of 4 Year Old in New York (VIDEO)
The new 911 system in New York suffered human error earlier this week, delaying emergency medical technicians from responding to an accident where a 4-year-old girl was struck by a car and killed.
The human error resulted in a four minute delay between the time an emergency call was made to the time an ambulance was dispatched to the scene of a car accident in Manhattan's Upper West Side on Tuesday.
Four year old Ariel Russo was killed, and her grandmother injured, when their vehicle was hit by an SUV, being driven by 17 year old Franklin Reyes who was fleeing police.
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Reyes had since been arrested on manslaughter, fleeing and unlicensed driving charges.
"It wasn't picked up by the person that should have been reading that screen," New York City Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano has said, according to ABC News.
"They just failed to read the screen," Cassano said. "We'll deal with that."
It has also been reported that an Emergency Medical Services dispatcher could face disciplinary action because of the human error in this case.
Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano admitted that one of their experienced dispatchers was going on break after failing to see the call as it came in.
Cassano told CBS New York: "The person that we interviewed said that there was a change in the shift, they were getting up and they just failed to read the screen…We'll deal with that in ways of a person should not get up until they're relieved properly…if discipline is required we'll discipline people."
The four year old was still alive when the ambulance finally arrived after eight minutes. She was rushed to hospital but was pronounced dead less than an hour later at St Luke's Hospital.
The new $2 billion 911 system in New York has controversially had numerous glitches and bugs recently, going down on four separate occasions last week. On one occasion it went down for an entire hour.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg has defended the new system: "It has some bugs in it. All new systems have. You wish you didn't have bugs but that is not the real world."
