Issues in Personal Preparedness for People with Disabilities

From Service Dog Training

Personal Preparedness for People with Disabilities

In honor of National Preparedness Month, the Dog Blog will be featuring a series of articles on a variety of topics associated with emergency preparedness for people with disabilities. Today’s post will focus on some often overlooked aspects of personal emergency preparedness for people with disabilities.

General emergency preparedness information both for people with and without disabilities is widely available online. However, certain critical aspects of preparedness for people with disabilities are often glossed over or not discussed at all. Below are a few things to consider.

Special Diets and Stockpiling Food

Recommendations for how much food a person should stockpile in their preparedness efforts ranges from 3 days to a week’s worth of food. However, it is generally assumed that this is food you will be using if while you take shelter in your home, and that it would not be practical to move all this food with you during an evacuation. This presents a special concern for people who must eat certain diets. Emergency shelters and distribution points for emergency food supplies are not often equipped to deal with special diets, especially those that are very restrictive. If you are on a special diet or have medically necessary dietary restrictions, plan to evacuate with the food you need to keep yourself safe and healthy. Keep this food in a water-proof container that is easy to grab as you evacuate your home.

Accessible Shelters

By law, emergency shelters are required to be accessible to people with disabilities, however, the reality is that many are not. In addition, during a disaster, emergency staff may not be aware of what features are necessary to call a shelter “accessible” and may not be able to accurately direct you to a shelter that meets your needs. Before you need them, find out where the designated shelters are in your area and check them out yourself. If you find some (or all) of the shelters are inaccessible, it is important to bring that concern to your city or county emergency manager.

“Special Needs” Shelters

The use of “special needs” shelters was initially designed to provide a safe sheltering environment for people who need intensive medical care and/or monitoring. However, they have instead become a sort of dumping ground for anyone with any sort of disability or medical need, including those that can be easily accommodated in an accessible general population shelter. There are several problems with segregating people with disabilities into special needs shelters: First, it is against the law, which requires city and county governments to provide services in the most integrated setting possible. Second, people entering a special needs shelter are usually allowed to bring, at most, one person with them. This means that people may be separated from family and friends that are crucial to providing moral support during a disaster. Third, people assigned to special needs shelters are often required to bring a personal care attendant. For someone that lives alone, this can be difficult, if not impossible to achieve during a disaster and can lead to people being denied access to essential sheltering services because of their disability. Find out if your city or county has a special needs or medical needs shelter, and what sort of people will be sent to those shelters. If all people with disabilities are sent to the special needs shelter, you should bring this problem to the emergency manager before you need the shelter to make sure you won’t be unnecessarily separated from your friends and family during a disaster.

Next week: Preparedness for Service Animal Users

--Tiffany Huggard-Lee 17:05, 4 September 2010 (CDT)

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