Agencies Taking Steps to Watch Over County’s Solitary Seniors

After a year of trekking the same route in Laguna Hills Leisure World, mail carrier Shelly Nieblas looked forward to greeting an elderly woman who most every day was outside her home feeding seed to wild birds.

In July, Nieblas suddenly stopped seeing the woman and noticed that she hadn’t been picking up her mail. She summoned the retirement community’s security guards, who found that the woman had suffered a stroke and lain on her bathroom floor for as long as 48 hours, partly paralyzed and barely conscious.

“The paramedics said she wouldn’t have made it another day,” recalled the 33-year-old mail carrier, who received a Christmas card from the woman’s grateful nephew.

And just last month in West Hollywood, the body of a 72-year-old woman was discovered in the closet of her home. She died of starvation or dehydration after being barricaded there by a robber.

That incident struck a nerve with many who work with the growing population of solitary elderly, those with no nearby relatives to look after them.

“It haunts me,” said Fay Blix, an attorney in Laguna Hills who specializes in representing the elderly. “To be so lost in society that no one knows you are missing.”

But today, several agencies in Orange County are taking new steps to keep watch over the elderly and other shut-ins.

Sometime this spring the Orange County Area Agency on Aging plans to inaugurate a computerized telephone system that will automatically make daily check-up calls to seniors who want the service. Further, the agency is recruiting volunteers to become telephone buddies with seniors who live alone.

Three months ago Garden Grove’s post office and Police Department instituted a program to look out for that city’s homebound. Residents may have a sticker placed inside their mailbox instructing the mail carrier, in the event that mail begins to pile up, to contact a postal supervisor who will call police.

The post office that delivers to Leisure World in Laguna Hills is considering adopting the same technique.

Mail carriers are the only daily contact that many frail elderly people have with the outside world. Still, whether seniors receive help from postal workers depends on the sharpness of each carrier’s instinct and sense of responsibility.

The U.S. Postal Service has a national “carrier alert” program for notifying friends or police if an elderly customer’s mail goes uncollected, but it is up to the postmaster in each community to decide whether to offer the service.

Only Garden Grove has taken that step in Orange County.

One reason is privacy, said Terri Bouffiou, spokeswoman for the county’s postal service. Reporting an overflow of mail to authorities “has to be something people request,” she said. “Otherwise we are invading their privacy too much. We don’t want to be Big Brother.”

But attorney Blix contends that protection of privacy should have its limits. “What kind of a country are we that we respect privacy more than life?” she asked.

In Santa Ana, postal district director Art Martinez said monitoring shut-ins “is not part of our normal duties. Our job is to deliver the mail.”

Martinez said he surveyed 44 post offices in his district, including most of Orange County and parts of San Bernardino, Riverside and Los Angeles counties, and discovered that only Garden Grove has an active carrier alert program.

“We are proud of some of the heroic efforts of letter carriers, but we don’t make it a requirement,” Martinez said.

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The numbers of those who could use the service are burgeoning. The state’s Department of Finance projects that Orange County will be home to about 358,000 people 60 and older as of July 1, up from about 307,000 five years ago. About 30% of those people live alone, according to the Orange County Area Agency on Aging.

Half of those 85 and older--the fastest expanding segment of the elder population--live alone, agency officials added. Moreover, it is estimated that more than one-fourth of those 65 and older who live alone have no children or siblings to check on them.

Peggy Weatherspoon, director of the Orange County Area Agency on Aging, said that while the governmental agency tries to serve all of the county’s seniors, it has a special mission to “reach out to the frail and isolated and homebound.”

Weatherspoon said the agency has purchased a computer program that will automatically place daily check-up calls to seniors who want them. If a program participant does not pick up the receiver, a second call will be placed. If again there is no response, the service will contact a relative or neighbor who has a key to enter the home.

The agency soon will test the “Are You OK” calling system on a selected group of seniors and hopes eventually to expand the service countywide.

She cautioned that the computerized system, programmed to call participants at a set time each day, will not summon paramedics as quickly as a call to 911.

And, she said, not all seniors want to be called: “Americans are a fiercely independent people and just because we get old we are not more likely to give that up.”

But for those who want to participate, she said, the service will be free and guarantee that a person who is unable to reach a telephone will not lie suffering alone without hope of help.

Orange County’s computer telephone program will be modeled after one operating in parts of San Diego County.

Daniel Laver, executive director of San Diego County Area Agency on Aging, said that advocates for the elderly there decided to build a more dependable safety net after an elderly Chula Vista woman who died in her apartment three years ago was not found for weeks.

Garden Grove’s new program, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” was put into effect “because our carriers cared and our police cared,” Postmaster Alyce Alford said.

About 200 bright-orange stickers have been passed out at the Garden Grove post office, she said, and more have been distributed at the local senior citizens center and Police Department.

“There is no paperwork involved, it is very simple and it doesn’t cost the citizens a dime,” said Frank Caruso, a Garden Grove patrol officer who suggested the program.

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Another alternative is for seniors to look after one another, others said.

Jenny Feishour, 88, has been looking after other seniors in her hometown of Anaheim for 20 years. It all began, she said, when a friend, whom she used to drive to the beauty shop, didn’t show up for her ride. Feishour called the woman’s grandson, who discovered his grandmother in bed with a stroke.

“I thought, ‘God, it is terrible for a person to be alone. I could have saved her that anguish,’ ” said Feishour, who now has a regular calling list of 35.

Beth Boomgaarden, a 72-year-old retired teacher who lives alone in a rented room in Anaheim, said Feishour’s call just after 8 a.m. “kind of starts off my day right. It is comforting.”