Pacific Bell Wins Dispute on 911 for Deaf : PUC Rejects Warning Over Possible Problems

Bowing to objections from Pacific Bell, the staff of the state Public Utilities Commission has decided not to order the company to issue a warning about possible problems with 911 emergency service to the deaf.

The decision appears to end a three-year lobbying effort by the family of Mary Bell Shufeldt, a deaf San Diego woman who died in 1986 after her husband, also deaf, tried unsuccessfully for three hours to reach a 911 operator using the teletypewriter service promoted by Pacific Bell.

Also at an end is a legal fight against Pacific Bell and its parent company, which the family sued unsuccessfully in a wrongful-death claim, alleging that the company advertised the service even though it knew the system might not work.

Request for Court Costs Dropped

Last week, Pacific Bell, which had asked that the Shufeldts be ordered to pay $20,921 in court costs, decided to drop the demand, a company spokesman said. The decision was made Thursday after a reporter inquired about the matter. Lawyers for Pacific Bell filed the request for the money last month, after the California Supreme Court refused to grant an appeal sought by the Shufeldts.

For Gregg F. Relyea, the lawyer who represented the Shufeldts, the developments are an unsatisfying resolution of an issue that remains a serious problem for the thousands of deaf Californians who rely on the teletypewriter machines.

“Three years after Mrs. Shufeldt died, these incidents are ongoing,” Relyea said. “Right now, the status of the 911 system is unknown and can’t be determined. Until someone conducts random ongoing testing of 911, there is no way to know whether 911 is accessible by TDDs.”

TDDs are the teletypewriter devices connected to phone lines in the homes of about 14,400 deaf or hearing-impaired Pacific Bell customers.

Problems with use of the 911 system by deaf people became apparent July 17, 1986, when Jay Shufeldt, then 74, returned home and found that the condition of his wife, who suffered from emphysema, appeared to have worsened. He tried repeatedly to call 911 on his teletypewriter, but a San Diego Police Department operator who was unfamiliar with the sound produced by the teletypewriter ignored the calls.

Prescribed Procedure

Under the prescribed procedure, the operator should have recognized the sound of Shufeldt’s machine and immediately transferred the call to a TDD in the 911 center. There, another operator would have taken the call and communicated with Shufeldt via another TDD.

Shufeldt eventually reached his daughter, who can hear, and was able to reach 911 from her home. However, paramedics arrived too late and were unable to save Mary Bell, who died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

In their lawsuit, Shufeldt and his children alleged that Pacific Bell knew in March, 1986, that some 911 operators in California were unfamiliar with the TDD equipment, yet went ahead and mailed out newsletters that month advising TDD users to stop using their traditional seven-digit emergency number because 911 was now available.

As the lawsuit progressed through the courts, Relyea began prodding the PUC to order that a warning be sent to deaf people advising them that the system might not be reliable and outlining backup procedures.

The PUC seemed to agree with Relyea and, last April 14, Marco Valenti, the PUC’s manager of consumer affairs, came up with a draft of a “Consumer Bulletin” on the subject.

It read, in part: “Hearing-impaired and speech-impaired users of Telecommunication Devices for the Deaf are cautioned that 911 emergency telephone service may not be accessible at all public safety answering points” such as police and fire departments. The draft advised that, if the caller does not get an acknowledgement, he should “seek assistance by some other means.”

But, three weeks later, after hearing from Pacific Bell, Valenti changed his mind.

Wanted to Avoid Negative View

“After a review of my draft ‘Consumer Bulletin’ by the parties at interest, I have decided not to issue the bulletin,” Valenti said in a letter to Relyea. Such a notice might “generate concerns that there are problems with the 911 service that do not exist,” the letter says.

Richard Fish, senior utilities engineer for the PUC, said the change was made after the staff received objections from Pacific Bell that a warning about TDDs “would generate a negative view of 911” and that instructions in the front of phone books were sufficient.

He said there have been only a few “isolated incidents” where the system failed to work and added that the state Department of General Services plans to issue new materials to 911 operators explaining how to answer TDD calls.

For their part, Pacific Bell executives say they believe the TDDs are working well with the 911 system and that they have no evidence a warning is warranted. Even if it were, they said, it would be improper for Pacific Bell to issue it.

“The objections that Pacific Bell raised were objections to our sending it out,” said Eric Sorensen, 911 product manager for the company.

Under state law, 911 service must be accessible to hearing-impaired people, he said, and for Pacific Bell to send out a notice that the system doesn’t work “would be an accusation that people are not doing their job. We have nothing to substantiate that accusation.”

Sorensen said he knows of no recent complaints about TDD/911 service and added that a warning might raise a false concern among the public.

However, attorney Relyea says he has forwarded two complaints similar to the Shufeldt case to the PUC in the last year. One occurred in San Diego and the other in the Los Angeles County community of Hacienda Heights. Neither resulted in a death, but each points up the continuing problem, he said.

Two Similar Complaints

“Pacific Bell, a private company, has imposed on a public regulatory agency to withhold a warning to consumers about a defect in 911,” Relyea said. “To this day, Pacific Bell has not notified any of its customers.”

Regarding the court costs sought by Pacific Bell from the Shufeldts, a company spokesman said the request was a routine one for the winning party in a lawsuit, but was dropped because of the special nature of the case.

The case never actually got to trial, but instead was thrown out during a lengthy legal fight over pretrial motions.

Pacific Bell and the government entities lost a bid to have the case thrown out at the Superior Court level, then lost again in the Court of Appeal. However, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Court of Appeal for reconsideration of several legal issues and a three-judge panel did a near-complete reversal.

Instead of focusing on the conduct of Pacific Bell, as it had before, the panel decided that Shufeldt was to blame in the incident for not seeking an alternative to 911 during the three hours before his wife died. “The tragic circumstances here do not readily lend themselves to an assignment of moral blame,” the panel said in its opinion written by Justice Patricia Benke.

Relyea said the position was an unusual one for the Court of Appeal, which he believes went beyond its proper role and put itself in the position of a trial court. But, because the case never got to trial, the facts of what happened the day Mary Bell Shufeldt died never were aired, so the court made its decision in a relative vacuum, he said.

Jay Shufeldt, he said, did not realize how grave the situation was until it was too late.

Shufeldt, now 77 and in declining health, is “dispirited about the way things have gone,” Relyea said. He continues to volunteer at a senior citizen center at the Civic Center in downtown San Diego, where he helps answer requests for information from the hearing-impaired. In recent months, however, he has cut back on his usual eight-hour days. He lives on a small pension from his job as a newspaper typesetter and on Social Security payments, Relyea said.

“He really cannot understand why the case was dismissed. He sees it as part of the mysterious world of the hearing.”