More than eight months after emergency telephone services for the hearing impaired were given the green light, Bermuda's deaf community continues to do without a specialised distress mechanism.

On September 17, 1993, Mr. L.E. Saunders of the Bermuda Telephone Company wrote a letter to Mr. Michael Scott, a lawyer and Progressive Labour Party candidate who first championed the issue of emergency services for the deaf during last year's election, in which he stated that "the decision had already been made, amongst the Emergency Services Group, to proceed with the implementation of this scheme shortly.'' Since that time, however, the process has become bogged down in a series of administrative and budgetary wranglings that have yet to see the Emergency Services Group, which consists of Police, Fire and Ambulance operations, produce a final system by which the Island's hearing impaired could effectively contact authorities during an emergency.

"This has been going on for months and months,'' said Mrs. Kereen Richards, unit co-ordinator of the emergency department at King Edward VII Hospital.

Having represented Ambulance services during several planning meetings, Mrs.

Richards said that there was no sense of urgency attached to the project at any stage.

"We (initially) had a meeting at the telephone company and then I didn't hear anything for months,'' she said.

According to Inspector Hiram Edwards, who has represented the Police during the eight-month discussion process, the project hit its first major snag when the Fire Department insisted this past winter on assuming direct control over its portion of the service.

That service would involve a portable teletype machine by which deaf customers could key in their requests for help and have them received by Police, Fire and Ambulance attendants with corresponding devices. According to Insp.

Edwards, the Fire Department wanted its own trained operators to accept incoming calls.

While that demand resulted in a brief impasse, "we all (eventually) agreed we should have one device,'' Insp. Edwards said.

In the meantime, Mrs. Richards of the Hospital's Emergency Unit said, there was some confusion during this period over the Police's exact role in the project.

"First the Police were going to be in charge (of accepting incoming calls), then Ambulance (Services) was and then it was the Police again,'' she said.

According to Mrs. Richards, the Police felt they would be unable to supervise the whole operation after examining their budget in or around April. As of yesterday, however, the Police continue to be responsible for taking all incoming calls.

With that question out of the way, the Police "are just about ready to tie (the project) up,'' Insp. Edwards said. In the last few weeks, they have asked the other units to provide a set of standard questions to be asked in emergency situations and are waiting for the information to come in from the Ambulance unit, Insp. Edwards confirmed.

According to Mrs. Richards, that list has been completed and is on its way to the Police.

How long it will now take for the Island's hearing impaired to actually have the teletype machines in their homes is unclear. According to the 1993 Census, there are some 206 hearing impaired people in Bermuda, each of whom must purchase the device from the phone company if they wish to partake of the service.

Over the past few months, the deaf community and the Bureau of Community Affairs have compiled a list of prospective users to make them aware of the service and eventually get them hooked up.

Explaining another delay, Insp. Edwards said: "It also took them a while to do that.''