The city of Oakland's 911 call dispatch system was dealing with more glitches Saturday.
After being down for nearly 26 hours, it was up and running again Friday night. But on Saturday morning, Oakland’s 911 dispatching system took another hit.
Oakland’s automated 911 dispatching center had to revert to doing things manually again. This follows a power failure that caused major technical glitches on Thursday.
“Yet again, we woke up and the CAD system that computerizes dispatching of police officers to emergencies collapsed yet again,” said Barry Donelan, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association. "It was down all morning, putting the dispatchers in a position, where they were again manually hand writing calls for service and physically handing them to a dispatcher to them on the radio. And officers were responding in teams of two to each of these calls. It slowed emergency services."
The city of Oakland released a statement Saturday morning, which said in part: “We observed impacts to the automated dispatching system. They added that "all dispatch staff resumed manual call routing, so routing for calls was slower than normal.”
All emergency calls were being answered and appropriately dispatched for police, fire and medical.
"I just would reiterate the efforts of these dispatchers Thursday, Friday and now Saturday. It's already a tough job and to toil under these circumstances is very difficult and also, again the frustration that citizens are facing," Donelan said.
On Thursday night, Oakland city officials said that a power outage took the system down.
NBC Bay Area learned backup generators failed to bring 911 calls online for several minutes until calls could be rerouted to the sheriff’s office. Then on Friday, phone lines were restored but the automated dispatch system was down until early evening.
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In a statement Friday, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao blamed decades of underinvestment in the city’s IT infrastructure and noted that she included $9.5 million in her next budget to address the city’s aging IT systems.
