Emergency management departments generally are ill-prepared for helping people with disabilities during and after a disaster, Kansas University researchers have concluded.

That leaves people with mobility impairments, deafness or other disabilities vulnerable during an emergency, the researchers say.

“The question is, do people with disabilities have any say in emergency planning?” asked Glen White, director of the Research and Training Center for Independent Living at KU. “There are a lot of things that get overlooked.”

The research team is in the third and final year of a $615,000 project funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The work has been dubbed Nobody Left Behind.

The project has investigated 30 randomly selected U.S. counties, cities, parishes and boroughs where a disaster occurred between 1999 and 2004 to determine whether disaster plans and emergency response systems met the needs of people with mobility impairments. Researchers now are conducting an Internet survey of people with disabilities. The survey can be found at www.nobodyleftbehind2.org.

The ultimate goal is to create a set of recommendations for policies and practices that should be mandated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The research so far has found that few emergency managers have taken FEMA’s emergency planning and special needs course, though they said it would be helpful. Only 40 percent of the departments surveyed have guidelines to assist people with disabilities during emergencies, although nearly all said having such guidelines was important.

Michael Fox, associate professor of health policy and management, said the next step would be to determine why emergency managers weren’t receiving training and implementing policies they think are important.

Fox said Coffey County, the only Kansas entity included in the project, was one of the best-prepared areas the researchers studied. He said money provided in conjunction with construction of the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant near Burlington could be the reason.

The hospital in Burlington has been upgraded to meet the needs of those with disabilities and the county has a voluntary database of people with special needs to reference when disaster strikes.

Other preparations suggested by White include:

• Putting in place a “reverse 911” system that would automatically call deaf people during an emergency such as a tornado warning.
• Investing in handicapped-accessible vans to evacuate people with disabilities.
• Constructing buildings, especially houses, with concrete-fortified safe spaces on the first floor, because people with mobility impairments wouldn’t be able to get to a basement with an elevator.

White, who uses a wheelchair, has a pantry in his home with concrete walls.

Teri Smith, assistant director of Douglas County Emergency Management, said her department had been working to find ways to inventory county residents with disabilities in hopes of better responding to their needs.

But creating a database is difficult because of federal privacy regulations. Relying on resident volunteers in an emergency would be key, she said.

“They know who their neighbors are, and we could respond in a timely manner,” Smith said.

She said having a specific plan for responding to people with disabilities could be politically difficult.

“It’s difficult in a disaster to say you’re going to have certain areas that are going to have priority over different areas,” she said.