Confronting the Challenges of Evacuating People with Disabilities
disability
In 2013, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, Margareta Wahlström, noted that people with disabilities experience a disproportionately high level of disaster-related injury and death because their needs are neglected by the official planning process in most situations.
The UN conducted a survey of people with disabilities who had survived disasters around the world. Few respondents were aware of any disaster management plans in their communities, and fewer had participated in any planning processes, although half of the respondents expressed a desire to do so.
According to survey respondents, just 20 percent said they could evacuate “immediately without difficulty” in the event of a sudden disaster. If “sufficient” time were available, the percentage of those who could evacuate without difficulty nearly doubled (to 38 percent), underscoring the need for effective and inclusive early warning systems.
There is no reason to believe that the situation in the U.S. is substantially different than the one highlighted in the UN report. According to a report issued by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2012, about 56.7 million people, or approximately 19 percent of the population, had a disability in 2010. Of those individuals who reported having a disability:
- About 7.6 million people experienced difficulty hearing, including 1.1 million whose difficulty was severe. About 5.6 million used a hearing aid.
- Roughly 30.6 million had difficulty walking or climbing stairs, or used a wheelchair, cane, crutches or walker.
- About 19.9 million people had difficulty lifting and grasping. This includes, for instance, trouble lifting an object like a bag of groceries or grasping a glass or pencil.
This means that in any disaster planned for by emergency management personnel, one in five people encountered will have a disability of some type. Studies after Hurricane Katrina found that approximately one-third of those who did not leave their homes during the disaster had a disability. In fact, when survivors were interviewed after the storm, the two primary reasons given for not evacuating were either the person had a disability or was a family member of someone with a disability and stayed behind to act as a caretaker. One of the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and other recent disasters is that the special needs of people with disabilities must be integrated into all aspects of emergency management.
So how does an emergency manager plan for the evacuation needs of disabled persons in the community?
Become familiar with planning tools that have already been developed by reputable organizations, such as the National Organization on Disability.
The organization’s guide, titled Functional Needs of People with Disabilities: A Guide for Emergency Managers, Planners and Responders, is a step-by-step how-to document on all aspects of planning for emergency managers and the people in their communities who have disabilities.