Power outage in Mumbai: Police control room affected for three hours

Monday morning’s power failure in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) severely impacted the functioning of the main control room of the Mumbai Police between 10am

Monday morning’s power failure in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) severely impacted the functioning of the main control room of the Mumbai Police between 10am and 1pm, a senior officer said. The control room is the biggest and busiest emergency response system of the city, which registers over 5,500 emergency calls everyday.

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All the machinery to monitor activities such as CCTV network feed, wireless vans, mobile data terminals, tablets and GPS-enabled first emergency response vehicles, video wall or monitoring screens, computer and internet-based systems ceased to function during the three-hour outage.

Police sources said that the emergency call response system on the 100 number helpline was also impacted and the personnel faced difficulties to resume its functioning in a full-fledged manner as the generators installed to supply power developed mechanical errors and could not be switched on immediately.

“Our staff received phone calls of citizens in distress and had to take down the details of their exact locations as the existing system which gives live GPS location of the caller to the police control room and shows the location of the nearby police team on the monitor screen, was not functioning due to the disruption in power supply. We also had to provide the details of the caller to the police team patrolling manually through wireless communications or mobile phones. Because of the power failure, the entire process of emergency response slowed down for nearly three hours,” said an officer from the control room.

All the five regional police control rooms, which coordinate with the main control room and local police for effective law and order management, were also badly impacted amid the power failure. “Operations at the regional police control room came to a standstill for over two hours as there was no power back up. Officers and staff used mobile phones to communicate,” said a control room officer from of one of the five regional police control rooms.

Suhas Warke, inspector general of police (law and order), said that there was no adverse impact on the state police control room and the director general of police (DGP) office.