“This new GPS-tracking system is a simple, innovative way to ensure inspectors reach their assigned locations and are held accountable for their important work,” said Commissioner LiMandri in a statement.

Inspectors regularly respond to emergency incidents, day and night, coordinate with firefighters, police officers and other investigators to conduct investigations and asses the stability of a structure or a piece of equipment as well as routinely inspecting vacant buildings, illegally converted dwellings and low and high-rise construction sites that could pose a variety of hazardous conditions allowing for the new GPS-based program to also help supervisors identify the closest inspectors and dispatch resources more efficiently to emergency incidents and pinpoint the location of an inspector if he or she loses contact with a supervisor by monitoring their inspector’s real-time movements from a computer at their work station or any other computer. This will provide employees with greater security during the course of their duties

“We have asked the construction industry to raise its standards,” added First Deputy Commissioner Fatma Amer. “And this new tool will help us raise ours.”

For security purposes, inspection unit heads will each receive a confidential log-in name and password to access the tracking system and monitor the locations of their inspectors. The daily routes of inspectors generatedfrom the new tracking system will be electronically recorded and stored in a DOB database.

The DOB has already implemented the new system for the first group of inspectors and by the end of September, press time, the routes of all construction inspectors, as well as inspectors from the Boilers, Cranes and Derricks, Electrical, Elevators and Plumbing units, will also be monitored electronically through their cell phones.