See the story translated in American Sign Language.

The company that has been providing emergency warning alerts to deaf and blind citizens in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana free of charge since a FEMA funded pilot program ended nearly four months ago plans to stop offering the service at end of the month — on the cusp of hurricane season — because of funding issues.

“We notified the states that we are going to quit on April 30,” said Kay Chiodo, founder and chief executive officer of Deaf Link Inc. “My company can’t fund three states. We can’t. There’s no way.”

The San Antonio-based company decided to continue providing the service on its own after Federal Emergency Management Agency funding ended on Dec. 31, 2007, because “we couldn’t just leave them standing there without any information,” considering they had been getting alerts for five months, Chiodo said of the deaf, blind, hard of hearing and deaf/blind community it serves.

“FEMA showed these people they could be included in emergency preparedness. They funded outreach to educate them and then they gave them alerts that would save their lives,” Chiodo said. “[Why] in the world would anybody want to take that away from them?”

Had Chiodo known that FEMA wouldn’t continue to provide the service after the contract ended on Dec. 31, she said she would have been reluctant to participate in the pilot program.

“From the very beginning, I said, ‘Don’t start it if you’re going to stop it,’” said Chiodo. According to Chiodo, FEMA and Sandia National Laboratories, which oversaw the pilot for FEMA, gave her the impression — though didn’t specifically state — that the service would continue beyond Dec. 31.

“They took access into these three states and then they turned and walked away,” Chiodo said of FEMA.

Under the program, Deaf Link provided emergency alerts to subscribers that were made available in American Sign Language, voice and text and could be accessed through the Internet on devices ranging from PDAs to computers.

As part of the pilot, and during the past four months, the company also sent e-mails to broadcasters with links to broadcast quality alerts in text, voice and sign language, Chiodo said. But she didn’t think the states readily used that component because “there wasn’t adequate outreach and education to the broadcasters” because of a lack of funding.

At last count, Deaf Link said there were 1,470 subscribers in Mississippi, 766 in Louisiana and 368 in Alabama. When the pilot program ended in December, there were 395 special needs citizens signed up.

“Funding constraints prohibited extensive outreach efforts” during the pilot program, said Dan Heller, vice president of business development. He noted that 11 percent of the U.S. population have some form of hearing disability or are visually impaired and the majority of the deaf population can’t read English syntax.

Going into the pilot program, Sandia knew that it wasn’t going to be able to do the kind of outreach Deaf Link thought should be done, said Sandia engineer Jeff Jortner, who worked on the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) pilot of which the Deaf Link program was a component. IPAWS is the “nation’s next generation public communications and warning capability,” according to FEMA.

“We wanted to see how feasible it was to use American sign language to send alerts to people in the deaf and hard of hearing community and one thing we found was that  . . .  in [the] alert and warning world there are alerts that have to get there really quickly and using American sign language it involves taping someone signing  . . .  the alert and posting it on the Web or sending alerts with a Web link to cell phones, and we found that it took a considerable time to accomplish that,” FEMA spokeswoman Mary Margaret Walker said.

“In fact, only about 6 percent of the messages sent that way arrived in less than 10 minutes. So, I think what we concluded is that there need to be multiple methodologies for reaching that community and others. So, I think we just have to use a combination of ways,” she continued.

Walker said the program worked, but the service Deaf Link provided can’t by itself be relied on to reach the deaf and hard of hearing community. When asked if the program was successful, Walker said, “We learned from it and that was the intent of the program.”

But Ron Glaser, who served as Sandia’s program manager for IPAWS said the Deaf Link program was successful.

“It would have been nice to put this in place permanently, but that wasn’t the direction and funding from FEMA,” he said.

Glaser said he believed the goal was to turn around an alert in 20 minutes. “Deaf Link actually beat that in most cases,” he said.

Steven Burr, an official in the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said his office was pleased with the Deaf Link program and would have liked it to continue.

“I would have loved to have tried to work with them in regards to continuing their services, but the price was way out of our range,” Burr said of Deaf Link. To have the service in the state for a year would cost more than $1 million, according to Burr.

“I wish we had the capability of utilizing their system,” Burr said. “Maybe we’ll work something out with them in the future. But right now  . . .  we are looking for alternatives.”

Going forward, Walker said it “would be up to the states to determine how they want to reach people with hearing difficulties in their areas, and so it would be up to them to find what vendors they would want to use and what works best for them and the people in their states.”

If states wanted to use a service such as Deaf Link, she said it would be their responsibility to fund it, though she later noted that “FEMA does fund alert and warning initiatives via a grant process through the states.”

As for why Chiodo thought the program was going to continue, she pointed to three main reasons: Sandia asking about the price of expanding it to other states; a letter from Glaser to the president/CEO of the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters stating that “this new capability will be provided at no cost to broadcast stations during the first phase of the pilot, after which it will be funded by IPAWS or the state of Louisiana;” and a conversation with a FEMA official in which she told him that if Deaf Link provides this service it shouldn’t be taken away and he said he understood and the company just had to prove its concept.

FEMA sees it differently.

“I’m not aware of any FEMA person implying this or telling them this,” Walker said. “A pilot program is a pilot program. There is a beginning and an end, and the end was specified as Dec. 31.”

Walker said the program was to test the concept and to see “the extent to which it worked and would work for a state or local jurisdiction and it worked to some extent.”

In an e-mail, Sandia spokesman Mike Janes said the letter was sent “very early on in the project  . . .  when enthusiasm was at its peak and hopes were high (by all parties) that the program would continue uninterrupted.”

But he said “no reasonable interpretation” of the letter dated Aug. 17, 2007, “would suggest an official guarantee of a long-term extension.” He noted the Dec. 31, 2007, end date was mentioned numerous times in the contract with Deaf Link.

Still, he said, “We’re just as disappointed as Deaf Link and others that it has been closed out.”

Glaser did say, however, that Sandia and FEMA had planned to conduct a second pilot program in 2008, likely in the Gulf Coast, and possibly involving Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, but FEMA recently decided against moving forward with such a project.

Unlike the first program, however, FEMA would not have paid for individual vendors such as Deaf Link. Instead, the states would have been responsible for paying the vendors and Sandia would have helped with integration. Under that scenario, Glaser suggested Deaf Link could have been one of the vendors.

Glaser said FEMA hasn’t told Sandia why it decided against moving forward with the program and Walker said all she knew was that the pilot program ended Dec. 31.

Chiodo was not the only one who thought the program might be extended. According to Burr, the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, told “FEMA or FEMA’s representatives” during several meetings that it wanted the program extended. But his office never heard back one way or the other.

“We would have preferred a longer pilot period,” he said. “We would have preferred a little bit more of an information flow from FEMA as far as what their plans for the future were.”

But the Alabama Emergency Management Agency never had the impression the program would continue beyond Dec. 31. “When AEMA was initially told about this project, we knew the end date was Dec., 31, 2007,” AEMA public information manager Yasamie Richardson said.

On Tuesday, Chiodo brought up the situation during a public input portion of the National Council on Disability’s quarterly meeting, and on Wednesday she asked FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison to “please help us.” Paulison was at the final day of the meeting to address the council.

“She brings up a very good point that there are certain communities out there we have to be very cognizant of in making sure particularly people who are either deaf or hard of hearing . . . people who are blind and to make sure that they get the same type of warnings as everybody else,” Paulison said. “So, the issue she brings up is an important issue for us, and we’re going to make sure that we’re on top of that. I know that they’re doing this as a volunteer group. Sometimes that’s what we have to do. But as we develop the IPAWS system further down the road and we spread it out across the country, those pieces will be included in it.

Daniel Fowler can be reached at dfowler@cq.com.