81-year-old Sidell Reiner was alone in her home near Boynton Beach last Thanksgiving preparing her family's holiday dinner when she cut herself on glassware. Alone and panicked, she dialed the operator from her Comcast-provided home phone for help.
Her husband and son later found her dead, and now family is now suing.
Rather than a "Comcast call center," as police records describe it, the call was routed to an outsourced private company hired by Comcast to provide operator services.
And rather than instruct her to hang up and dial 911, a recording told Reiner to press "0."
She did -- repeatedly -- but the Interstate FiberNet Inc., employee who answered did not have access to Comcast customer information and couldn't find Reiner's address.
Reiner plead with the operator for an ambulance, but paramedics were dispatched to the wrong address, took nearly half an hour to arrive at her house, and then left the home after they were unable to get an answer at the door.
"It deeply concerns me," Gary M. Cohen, the Reiner family's attorney, told the Sun-Sentinel. "Where was this operator located? Was she local? Are they hooked up to Comcast's computer system as they should be?... What kind of training were they given? What kind of experience did they have? What kind of procedures did they have in place?"
Local
Both Interstate FiberNet and Comcast claim the call center was located in the United States, and the South Florida cable giant says it is compliant with the FCC's regulations for emergency calls.
But Paul Linee, a Minneapolis communications consultant, seemed to agree with Reiner's family that what happened was unacceptable.
"Clearly, Comcast has not lived up to the best practices in the business for what to do when people dial zero for an emergency," he said.
