Guest Blog: Susan Dooha on "Lessons Not Learned" in NYC Emergency Shelters for PWDs

Intro:  Over this last weekend, many people in the disability community were watching the progress of Hurricane Irene and hoping that - finally - disabled people were being properly taken into account in emergency plans.  Judging from the reports from Susan Dooha, Executive Director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (CIDNY), it's lucky for disabled people in NYC that the worst-case scenarios didn't play out.  Mostly, NDY focuses on issues such as euthanasia, assisted suicide, futile care cases and other direct attacks on the lives of disabled people.  But as we saw from the people abandoned to die in a nursing home and killed in a hospital during Hurricane Katrina, disasters can be very deadly for disabled people of all ages, through abandonment and worse.

Rather than describe those reports, we asked Ms. Dooha to share her experiences inspecting shelters in NYC and what she found:

Since 2001, our New York City disability rights agency has been working with OEM (Office of Emergency Management), FEMA, VOAD (National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster) and other organizations on emergency preparedness and disaster response. In 2001, we published a monograph "Lessons Learned" about the experiences of people with disabilities on September 11th. Among the issues we raised at that time were a lack of preparedness to include people with disabilities. Inaccessible shelters and transportation issues, etc.

In the intervening years, we have tried to work with these entities to improve their preparedness. We have provided training, consulted on strategy--suggesting approaches, have attended endless meetings. We succeeded in getting them to include "actual" people with disabilities in their preparedness drills (or at least a couple of them) and continually raised unresolved issues.

In preparation for today, we received assurances that the shelters would be accessible--entries, cots, bathrooms--unlike 9/11. On the strength of this information, we contacted people with disabilities in Zone A areas and advised them of the nearest shelter and encouraged their cooperation in evacuation efforts.

Today, to see for myself that they were safe and that we had been properly counseled, I went to 6 shelters in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens serving people in Red Hook, Fort Green, Long Island City and Lower Manhattan. I found: dangerous ramps leading to locked doors; food up flights of stairs that people with disabilities would not be able to climb; inaccessible bathrooms; cots that would be unusable by people using wheelchairs; lack of volunteers trained to deal with these issues; reliance on elevators (where they existed) that would go out in the event of a power outage; accessibility signage leading to locked doors; reliance on inaccessible transportation (school buses) etc. I focused on these areas because they include many people living on fixed incomes who would not have the wherewithal to evacuate on their own, don't have family or friends to help--or with accessible apartments to shelter them, and who couldn't afford to evacuate.

I have been contacted by someone who says that her friend went to a shelter and was turned away because she was in a chair. I will be pursuing her experience.

I applaud the excellent work of volunteers in the shelters--but am very deeply disturbed by the continued recalcitrance of the City and Federal government when it comes to emergency preparedness and disaster response. I think that the City and State had a wake up call on violations of federal civil rights with 9/11 and again with Katrina.  I think that they hit the snooze button.

I think they need another wake up call.  --Susan Dooha