The mayor of Everett is lodging his disappointment with hang-ups with the new 911 dispatching software called New World Systems.
The flashpoint came when fire officials encountered serious problems from 911 dispatch while tackling the massive warehouse fire along the Everett waterfront June 4.
It took more than 20 minutes for 911 dispatchers to be able to kickstart the software to escalate the fire level to deploy additional fire departments to the scene. This process is usually immediate; it was a three-alarm fire.
“The primary purpose of this system is to keep our community safe by dispatch-ing emergency responders in a timely and efficient manner. The New World System has failed to do that on a number of occasions, and that is simply unacceptable,” Mayor Ray Stephanson wrote in concluding remarks in a
June 15 letter to the vice president of the dispatch software’s creators Tyler Technologies.
The New World Systems software launched county-wide in October after a number of implementation delays. It was launched as a new, highly integrated and improved system over the old one. Since its launch, law enforcement officials, though, have expressed concerns in private about the system.