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Lack of Captioning During San Diego's October 2003 Wildfires

"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 occurrence.

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?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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.

We were very surprised when the mandated 30-day response period expired without any word from either the FCC or the television stations. So we sent a follow-up email, only to have that ignored as well. We were stumped!

Contact!

I mentioned this non-response on one of the hearing loss lists, and I got a reply from someone at the FCC. It turns out that the email address I was using (access@fcc.gov) is no longer active and has been replaced by a new one (fccinfo@fcc.gov). 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 don't recall seeing any announcement from the FCC regarding the change in the contact address. And my emails didn't bounce, and I didn't get any notification that the email address was no longer valid. So I had NO WAY of knowing that I was using a bad email address!

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 do that, but I got no response to those suggestions.

Responses!

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!

Outcomes!

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.

Conclusions!

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

In emergency situations do YOUR local stations provide you access to emergency information that is equivalent to what people with normal hearing have?

If not, are you outraged?

If not, why not?

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 dividneds. I believe that San Diegans with hearing loss will never again be in the situation of having inferior 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. One of the stations 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.

I know you're busy, and harried, and have so little time to do the things you like to do. When you see a social injustice you'd like to write a letter or send an email. But it's so hard to find the time. And besides, nothing would really happen as a result of my letter. Right?