This past winter taught many harsh lessons about the lack of readiness of local communities for supporting people with disabilities during an infrastructure emergency:
- Lists of people with disabilities who need help don't have a good method for recruiting, updating, or correcting information.
- There is a lack of coordination among first responders about people with disabilities
- Telling people to go to a warming shelter is pointless if you can't get out of your building and have no viable mode of transportation
- There aren't nearly enough accessible hotel/motel rooms for the number of people with disabilities that can be affected in a sizable emergency.
The primary lesson we at MDRC have taken is that the top down model of emergency preparedness for people with disabilities needs to be parallel to a bottom up model that takes into account the known needs of individuals with disabilities.
MDRC is partnering with a variety of local emergency preparedness and disability organizations to help create and maintain that bottom up model. We are also looking to increase the number of shelters that are accessible for people with disabilities by bolstering the infrastructure of disability organization buildings that are already physically accessible to include independent electricity generation, floor level beds, food stuffs and the ability to deal with medication issues.
I will be updating our progress beyond the #ruready initiative (continuing to use the same hashtag) as we begin to flesh out this change effort.