A woman who was quadriplegic couldn’t get to the upper floors of her home during a recent hurricane. She drowned on the first floor.

It’s a story Glen White tells to illustrate how people with disabilities need special help to stay safe during natural disasters.

“The point is if you can do preparation on the front side you can certainly help move as many people as possible out of harm’s way,” White said.

White, director of the Research and Training Center for Independent Living, and other Kansas University researchers have been tapped to study how Hurricane Katrina affected Gulf Coast residents with disabilities. Tony Cahill, director of the Center for Development and Disability at the University of New Mexico, will co-direct the study.

The research, paid for with a $162,000 grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, will involve gathering information from emergency managers and independent living centers. The team of researchers will travel to the Gulf Coast to look at how the agencies and centers planned for helping people with disabilities and what they did before, during, and after the storm.

Kansas University researchers have for years been working on ways to aid people with disabilities during major disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Researchers working on the project of Nobody

In previous research, the team has found that many agencies don’t properly prepare for how to aid people with disabilities, said Michael Fox, associate professor of health policy and management at KU and a co-director of the study.

The same researchers looked at a similar topic in 30 randomly selected areas across the United States that had been hit with recent natural disasters. In that research, they found that many local emergency managers had not taken a Federal Emergency Management Agency course on how to aid people with disabilities during a disaster, even though many managers admitted they thought the course was important.

According to Fox, some agencies said they didn’t take the course because they had other more pressing priorities, limited financial resources or other reasons.

Fox said he believes mistakes were made during Katrina, though officials meant to do the right thing.

“I think there was a legitimate confusion among well-intentioned people as to how that evacuation should take place,” he said. “People died as a consequence of that.”

The project will take about a year. The team hopes their findings help policymakers and others to make changes where necessary. They also hope that people with disabilities are increasingly included in the planning process.

“Why not talk to the people who are affected by the problem?” White said.