Subject: [NEXTEL-1] HOUSTON- Emergency dispatch system hits another bump in the road

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 18:19:42 -0400

Emergency dispatch system hits another bump in the road

By Miya Shay
ABC13 Eyewitness News
(10/02/03 - HOUSTON) — It's happened
again. Houston's new dispatch system
crashed, causing lots of confusion. The
city says the system isn't broken, it just
has a few kinks.
ABC13 report
50 most recent local headlines

Under mounting pressure by people looking for answers, city officials responsible
for the dispatch system met with reporters at the City Hall Annex Thursday
afternoon. What people want to know is why did the system go down? And more
importantly perhaps, how long before the kinks are worked out?

By Thursday afternoon officials were admitting the dispatch computer system did
indeed crash.
"At about 9:50 Thursday morning the system did go offline," Director of Public
Safety John Bales acknowledged.
Officials say the crash lasted about half an hour and no calls were lost. But it's
just one more problem on top of an already large heap of issues that has plagued
the system since it launched last week.

Johnnie McFarland of the Fraternal Order of Police said, "When people call, they
want service now. They don't want service when the kinks are all out."

But working out the kinks is exactly what's being done. Authorities say they
singled out one bad piece of hardware Thursday morning.

"We found one particular hardware that was a bottleneck to the system," said Roy
Morales, Assistant Director of Public Safety.

And with that hardware removed, the system is now back online, though critics
aren't satisfied.
McFarland said, "I think we should go back to the old system until the new system
is up and running."
Officials say they are not going back to the old system, however, they are working
continually on improving the new system. But they are not willing to offer any
guarantees that nothing else will happen after Thursday's outage.

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/100203_local_dispatch.html

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