California to Upgrade 911 Service for Deaf

The Justice Department and the state announced an agreement Wednesday to upgrade 911 telephone service for an estimated 3 million hearing-impaired people throughout California by purchasing new equipment and offering special training for emergency personnel handling the calls.

Under the settlement, the state Department of General Services will spend $2 million to install telecommunication devices for the deaf, know as TDDs, in 475 emergency telephone centers statewide.

“This agreement will save lives,” said Atty. Gen. Janet Reno. “I commend California for taking this step to comply with the law.”

Advocates for the deaf hailed the announcement. “It has been a long time in coming,” said Sheri Mutti, executive director of the NorCal Center on Deafness in Sacramento. “We’ve tried to educate the various 911 centers, but due to high turnover in operators, we tend to fall through the cracks.”

The federal Americans With Disabilities Act requires that cities provide telephone emergency services, including 911 calls, to the disabled.

The state previously had a network of special 911 centers to handle calls from hearing-impaired people. But often such callers had to go through a two-step process to be transferred to those centers, where trained operators were stationed.

After getting complaints nationwide, the Justice Department decided that the two-step procedure was no longer acceptable.

Under the agreement, all 911 operators in California will have TDDs available to eliminate the need to transfer such calls.

Federal officials cited the case of a Sacramento County senior citizen who called a 911 service in November 1994 to report an apparent heart attack. She misinterpreted the transfer of her call as a disconnection and went to a neighbor’s house, where she collapsed.

Similar complaints nationwide led federal officials to seek agreements with states to improve 911 procedures for the hearing-impaired.

California is the first state to make such a settlement because “it is one of very few that has a mechanism for dealing with 911 services on a statewide basis,” said John Wodatch, an attorney who specializes in disability issues in the Justice Department.

Since 1976, the state has collected funds to buy 911 equipment via a surcharge on customers’ monthly telephone bills.

The annual equipment budget is $68 million, said Anne Richards, a spokeswoman for the General Services Department. The state supplies the TDDs, and local communities fund the operation of the 911 centers.

The allocation of $2 million will not result in cutbacks elsewhere in the program, Richards said, because the state expected to realize some savings by eliminating the transfers of calls from the hearing-impaired.

The Justice Department had already reached similar agreements with Los Angeles and Berkeley in 1994. Richards said that under the new statewide arrangement those cities could seek reimbursement for the cost of expanding their local TDD networks.