San Diego Emergency Captioning Update

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 during the critical hours when the fire was bearing down on the city of San Diego. Hearing Loss Network (http://www.hearinglossnetwork.org) 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 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.