City’s 911 System for Deaf Didn’t Meet Deadline : Was Installed Months After Required by State Law, Documents Reveal

Officials of San Diego’s 911 emergency telephone system failed to make the service accessible to deaf callers until months after they were required to do so under state law, according to documents obtained by The Times.

The documents, including memos by telephone company employees who discovered the problem, indicate that the city resisted implementing the new system as late as June 24, 1986, just weeks before a San Diego woman died after her deaf husband’s calls to 911 went unanswered.

Asked about the documents, the police officer in charge of San Diego’s 911 system acknowledged this week that the city did not train emergency operators in the new procedures for months after Pacific Bell began promoting the service to the deaf.

Materials ‘Misdirected’

Lt. Curt Munro blamed the delay on mail delivery, saying instructions and training materials from the state were “misdirected.” Munro said the 911 supervisors quoted in the Pacific Bell documents were unaware that the law had changed.

“There was a delay in us understanding that we were supposed to have been preparing for the 911 TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) use,” Munro said. “After the law was implemented, there was a delay.”

Operator Hung Up

Mary Bell Shufeldt, 72, died July 17, 1986, after a 911 operator hung up on her husband’s calls. Police officials have said the operator mistook the signal of the Shufeldts’ TDD for someone playing with the phone.

The Shufeldt family is suing the dispatch operator, the city, county, state, and Pacific Bell and its parent company. The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in May, accuses them of negligence that allegedly resulted in Mrs. Shufeldt’s death.

The incident has raised concerns in San Diego and statewide about the reliability of the 911 system for deaf and hearing-impaired people, many of whom rely on TDDs to communicate by telephone and in emergencies.

Under California law, all agencies operating 911 systems were to have made them accessible to TDDs by Jan. 1, 1986. In the past, they had used special, seven-digit emergency numbers, such as 233-DEAF, the number used in San Diego.

The availability of 911 for the deaf had been promoted in early 1986 in brochures mailed by the phone company to all TDD users. Similarly, San Diego’s June, 1986, directory of city offices and telephone numbers listed 911 as the only emergency number for the deaf.

Memos About Problems

The documents, obtained through a source familiar with the Shufeldt case, consist of memos written by Pacific Bell employees and a letter to state officials about persistent problems with the San Diego system in the months before Shufeldt’s July 17 death.

- A March 10, 1986, letter from Pacific Bell to the state’s 911 program manager, Bill Brandenburg, states that a phone company employee preparing the telephone book’s customer guide pages found that San Diego officials intended to continue using 233-DEAF, not 911.

“You agreed to contact these individuals and refresh their memory that effective January 1, 1986, by state law 911 is the only emergency number in California,” wrote Pacific Bell’s 911 manager, Don Steif, referring to a conference call that morning with Brandenburg.

“If these (911 centers) continue to refuse to use 911 you intend to turn the matter over to the State Attorney General,” Steif said.

Asked Tuesday about the letter, Brandenburg said he recalled no problems with San Diego’s compliance with the law. He said he remembered neither the communications with Steif nor the discussion of sending cases to the attorney general.

“That probably turned out to be a routine thing,” Brandenburg said of any confusion over implementation of the new state law in San Diego. “They didn’t understand, they weren’t aware. I explained and that was the end of it.”

- The following month, a Pacific Bell employee used a TDD to call 911 in San Diego as part of a statewide program to check 911 accessibility for the deaf. The call came after a March 5 test call to San Diego found “no 911 TDD access.”

After the April 18 call, the tester reported that dispatch supervisor Gil O’Dell “did not know about 911 procedure for TDDs” and assumed the deaf would use the old number. O’Dell said the operators had not been trained in taking 911 calls from the deaf, the documents state.

Pacific Bell procedures required that the tester then re-explain the new system.

- On June 24, a tester reported an additional conversation with O’Dell. According to the Pacific Bell notes, O’Dell said he preferred that deaf people use the old number because adapting the 911 system was “time-consuming and awkward.”

He said he was unaware that the state was requiring access to 911, the report said.

O’Dell could not be reached for comment Tuesday and Wednesday.

Munro, however, blamed any problems on the mail.

“One problem we experienced, and I discussed it with Bill Brandenburg . . . was the fact that we were not receiving 911 program mail at the communications division. . . . We had not received any of the instructions. So I think therein lies some of the problem.”

As a result, Munro said, the division did not learn about the change in the law until months after it went into effect. Nor had it received the training tapes mailed out by the state to teach dispatch operators how to handle 911 TDD calls, he said.

Demonstrate Sound

The tapes demonstrate the distinctive, high-pitched beeping sound made by TDDs over a phone line. That sound is a signal to transfer the call to a dispatch console equipped with another TDD in order to communicate with the caller.

Munro said he first learned of the new law when Brandenburg visited San Diego--perhaps in March or April, 1986. He said he then asked Brandenburg to re-send the implementation order and training materials.

“That was the first time I knew about it,” Munro said Wednesday.

“I remember that once we found out . . . we explained to the supervisors that this was the law,” Munro added. He said he could not recall precisely when the department learned of the change but said he believed it was shortly before the Shufeldt incident.

Nevertheless, Munro insisted the 911 operators knew all along how to handle calls from the deaf. He said a TDD had been used in the office for seven-digit calls for more than a decade and operators had been trained in its use.

Neither officials from Pacific Bell nor deputy city attorney William Donnell, who is representing the city in the Shufeldt case, would comment on the documents. They said they have policies of not talking about cases in litigation.

Mrs. Shufeldt died July 17 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease after collapsing in her San Diego home. Her husband Jay, who was 74, has said he tried at least three times to call 911 for emergency help but was unable to get through.

Finally, Shufeldt reached his daughter, who is not deaf. She called 911 and got through. But by the time paramedics arrived at the downtown San Diego home, Mrs. Shufeldt was dead.

An internal Police Department investigation concluded in August that a 911 operator failed to recognize the signal transmitted by Shufeldt’s machine. “She thought that children were playing with the phone” and hung up, a Police Department investigator said.