[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The bosses in charge of DC's crumbling 911 dispatch system have resorted to offering their staff an extra $800 a month just to turn up to work when they are supposed to.
The desperate move came after the number of dangerously undermanned shifts jumped from 24 percent in May, to 88 percent in July.
IT failures have stopped emergency calls coming through seven times so far this year including earlier this month when a five-month-old baby died during a two-hour outage.
And the system has become so unreliable that DC Fire and EMS has now created a shadow dispatch operation for the calls they need to deal with.
'Is it not wild to you that our first-responder agency has set up a workaround for our 911 call center?' demanded DC council member Brianne Nadeau. 'It's bonkers.' |