Hearing Loss Network

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Lack of TV Captioning During San Diego Fire Emergency

"If you're not outraged, you don't understand what's happening!"

I first heard that quote many years ago, and it's popped into my head on rare occasions when I witness some appropriately egregious occurence.

Here's another one: "You can judge a society by how it treats its least powerful members."

Unfortunately, people with hearing loss are often among the "least powerful", which is a telling indictment in itself. But the fact that our society would allow the lives of so many of our citizens to be endangered by lack of information during the recent fire emergency is deplorable. Shame on us!

If you're not outraged, you don't understand what's happening!

Here's the story:

San Diego recently experienced the worst fire emergency in the county's history. Fourteen people died, hundreds of homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of acres burned. Television and radio stations were broadcasting information, advisories, status updates, recommendations and emergency warnings around the clock during the crucial two days of the fire emergency. Those who could hear had easy access to lots of information. For those with hearing loss, much or all of the information was totally inaccessible.

Imagine the situation of a person with hearing loss during the emergency. The outside (and to a lesser extent, inside) air is filled with smoke. Television coverage has shown film after film of raging fires for the past several hours, and the names of the towns and neighborhoods are getting closer and closer to YOUR house. Then you see another film of a 30-foot firewall with the name of YOUR neighborhood. And the crawl at the bottom of the screen says, "YourTown evacuating"!

But there are NO CAPTIONS, so you don't understand what the newscaster is saying, and that's the IMPORTANT STUFF! You jump on the TTY, but your friends don't know any more than you do! Police and fire aren't answering!

Are you supposed to evacuate? If so, where should you go? Are any of the roads around here closed?

You have NO WAY to answer any of these questions. You look outside and the neighborhood appears calm, so you relax a bit and go back to the television.

Twenty minutes later, the stuff on TV is much the same. You glance out your window and see your neighbors throwing stuff in their car and driving off! You try to talk to them, but you're stressed and they're in a hurry, and you don't understand what they're saying. You try to give them paper and a pen, but they shove it away, jump in their car, and drive off!

What to do?

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Did that scenario happen during the fire? Probably something very much like it did.

I haven't heard anyone tell that story, but I also haven't talked to all 300,000 San Diegans with hearing loss. As far as we know, no one died because of the lack of captioning, and for that we can all be grateful.

But that doesn't excuse the stations for abrogating their responsibility to make ALL emergency information accessible to people with hearing loss. After all, the FCC requires them to do so; failure to comply is not just immoral; it's illegal!

Following the San Diego fires, Hearing Loss Network filed formal complaints with the FCC regarding this illegal behavior on the part of local stations, and we encouraged others to do the same. Federal law requires that the stations respond to the complaint within 30 days. Watch for our update on November 28.

December 3, 2003 - We have received no response from the FCC or from any of the television stations. It's almost as if the complaints were never sent! Here's the text of our followup letter, sent on December 3.

February 14, 2004 - Additional followups to the FCC produced no reply, and we still haven't heard from any of the TV stations to which we complained. But a lucky coincidence gets this situation moving forward again!

February 27, 2004 - Today we received copies of the complaints that the FCC sent to the four TV stations against which we filed complaints.

August 12, 2004 - We apologize for being remiss in keeping you up to date with what's going on in this case. Here's the latest and greatest update!

February 23, 2005 - HOORAY!! We got word today that the FCC is fining three of the local stations for failure to comply with FCC regulations. Here's more information!

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You may remember the horrible wildfires that burned much of the San Diego area last October, and my (and others') complaints to the local TV stations and the FCC about the lack of required emergency captioning. After receiving no response in 30 days, I sent another email to the FCC - still no response. Thirty days later, another email - with the same result. During this time I also heard nothing from the TV stations.

I happened to mention this on bhNEWS a couple of weeks ago, and someone forwarded my comments to someone at the FCC, and I got a response!

It seems that the email address that I used (access@fcc.gov) is no longer active and has been replaced by fccinfo@fcc.gov . So please make a note of that so YOUR complaints don't wind up in some cyberspace dead-letter office.

The interesting thing about this is that I didn't get any notification that the email address was no longer valid, and my email didn't bounce. I may have missed an announcement, but I sure don't recall any notice from the FCC about the change in contact information.

I did express these concerns to my new FCC contact and encouraged her to either provide a bounce notification so people know that the address is no longer valid, or simply forward mail from the "access" address to the "fccinfo" address. I even volunteered to help them with that, in case there's no one at the FCC who knows how. I got no response to those suggestions.

The good news is that I'll be receiving copies of the Notices that the FCC sends to the TV stations.

Stay tuned!

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San Diego Emergency Captioning Update

February 27, 2004

In Issue 7 we reported on the lack of emergency captioning during the San Diego wildfires and the difficulties we had getting our complaint to the FCC. The problem was that the previous email address for complaints in no longer being monitored, complaints sent to that address are not forwarded, and no "bounce" message is generated to let you know that your complaint ended up in cyber never-never land.

But there is good news. I just received a copy of the complaints that the FCC sent to each of the four TV stations against which we filed complaints. The date of the notices is February 20, and the TV stations have 30 days to reply to the complaints, with a copy to us. So we should have those by March 21

Stay tuned for continuing updates on the FCC's efforts to enforce YOUR right to receive complete information during an emergency.

San Diego Emergency Captioning Update 

August 12, 2004

Well, a lot has happened since last fall's wildfires. Here's a short summary of previous articles for those who missed them.

In October 2003, San Diego County experienced the worst fire emergency in the county's history. Fourteen people died, hundreds of homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of acres burned. The local TV stations naturally went to 24-hour coverage, but no captioning was available on during the critical hours when the fire was bearing down on the city of San Diego. Hearing Loss Network filed FCC complaints, and after a couple of hiccups, the FCC responded with notices to the local stations.

For a more detailed account of how we got to that point, please point your browser to http://www.hearinglossnetwork.org/serv/advcy/fire/fire.htm .

About a month later the responses from the TV stations started rolling in. They all claimed that they had done a wonderful job of making the information accessible to their viewers with hearing loss. They had charts and graphs and maps and tickers, all of which had a wealth of information! It's true that there was a lot of visual information presented, with some stations doing a better job than others. (Note that the FCC requirement does NOT specify captions; it specifies that emergency information presented by program audio must also be prevented visually).

But the really important stuff was the late-breaking information about new evacuations, road closures, unexpected fire progress, etc. and that information wasn't presented visually until eons later (in fire emergency time) when it showed up on some chart or map. One station even sent a couple of videotapes to show how much visual information they presented, and they just reinforced the argument that the really important stuff wasn't provided visually until much later!

Two of the stations mentioned that, even though they had done a great job of providing information to all viewers and were clearly in compliance with the FCC requirements, they had recently placed captioning companies on retainer to ensure that they would do an even better job during future emergency situations.

And two of the stations subsequently hosted meetings to address community concerns and learn more about the issue of providing emergency information to people with hearing loss. Hearing Loss Network has established a good working relationship with both of those stations, and we continue to work with them on this important issue.

This whole process has been (after a slightly rocky start) amazingly smooth and easy. A small amount of effort to complain about a grievous injustice has paid enormous dividends. I believe that San Diegans with hearing loss will never again be in the situation of not having television access to emergency information. Evidence of that was provided not too long ago, when a wildfire erupted in a rural area about 40 miles northeast of San Diego. KGTV Channel 10 swung into action to provide emergency coverage. Almost immediately three people called the captioning company to request service, and captions were on the screen within a few minutes of the start of the broadcast.

FCC Proposes Fines for TV Stations

February 23, 2005

Well, the FCC has finally acted! And they have proposed fines for three of the local stations for failure to comply with FCC regulations. That's the good news! The bad news is that the maximum fine mandated by law for failure to provide emergency captioning is $27,500. Note that the Congress is proposing a fine of $500,000 PER INSTANCE for cursing over the airways. I suppose one could argue that this means that the Feds think uttering a single swear word over the public airways is 18 times more serious than endangering the lives of a bunch of people with hearing loss by not providing them access in an emergency!

But let's celebrate today and we can take on more of the insanity tomorrow.

There's an nice article about this development in the San Diego Union Tribune.

The article points out that Channel 10 stepped up to the plate and acknowledged that they had dropped the ball on this one. And they have taken steps to remedy the situation. I had the privilege to meet with their representatives last summer, and was impressed to learn all they had done to provide access to San Diegans with hearing loss.

Kudos to Channel 10!

I'd also like to comment on KNSD Channel 39. We included them in the original complaint, because they did not provide captioning at the beginning of the emergency. But a couple of people pointed out that they did have captioning later that first day, much sooner than the other stations. In acknowledgement of their efforts, we removed them from the complaint.

So, Kudos to Channel 39, as well!

As for channels 8 and 51, shame on you! There's not a lot of ambiguity in the regulations, and the videotapes you sent to demonstrate that you complied with the regulations prove that you did not. We would like to see you accept the responsiblity to fulfill your civic duty, rather than claim you were in compliance.

Channels 8 and 51, shame on you!

For those who want to know all the gory details of the proposed fines, here are links to the FCC documents. Note that these are pdf files.

KFMB Channel 8

KGTV Channel 10

KUSI Channel 51