Measuring Katrina’s Impact on People with Disabilities

A report investigates how nearly half a million people with disabilities Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were affected by Hurricane Katrina.

By Rob Ingraham

“Every person interviewed for this report lost their residence and household belongings, while over half lost items that significantly affected their independence for weeks or even months after the storm. These included such things as vehicles, durable medical equipment, or accessible housing. Many also lost the family or social networks that sustained them. Reactions of respondents understandably ranged from fear and disbelief, to shock, grief, anger, and considerable depression.”
— Assessing the Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Persons with Disabilities, p. 12.

Gulf Coast residents will mark the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this August, and while the catastrophe continues to be analyzed from dozens of angles, its affect on people with disabilities was, arguably, the most profound. In one of the first detailed studies of Katrina’s impact on this most vulnerable population, investigators from the Research and Training Center on Independent Living (RTC/IL) at the University of Kansas distilled their findings to significant gaps in three key areas: planning, communication and coordination.

The report, Assessing the Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Persons with Disabilities, funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), uses a combination of surveys, focus groups, and interviews in six sites in the Gulf Coast states with 65 individuals associated with Centers for Independent Living (CILs) and six emergency managers. More than 453,000 people with disabilities five years of age and older in the coastal counties or parishes were affected by Katrina in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Principal investigator Glenn W. White, PhD, professor in the Applied Behavioral Science department at the University of Kansas and director of the RTC/IL, explains that the following serious problems were identified:

• Pre-disaster planning by CILs, people with disabilities, and local emergency management agencies;
• Pre- and post-disaster communication and information sharing within CILs, between CILs and consumers, and between local emergency management agencies;
• and Pre- and post disaster coordination between CILs and other disability agencies, local and regional emergency management groups, and community supports.

“Our report wasn’t really an ‘intervention’ report,” White says. “It’s more what I would call surveillance, a ‘social reconnaissance,’ trying to get a sense of what we know about the nature of [the disaster]; what are the dynamics of the barriers for people with disabilities; and, finally, what can we do now to really intervene and really get people out of harm’s way and increase the likelihood of survival?”

The Katrina Anomaly

According to the report, “Hurricane Katrina and the other storms of 2005 were an anomaly—far more severe than anything that had occurred before in terms of both severity and breadth….The force of Katrina pushed human and material resources to extreme limits. It had a severe disruptive impact on entire communities, including people with and without disabilities as well as political, social, and legal systems.”

Misplaced confidence, based on past experience, played a significant role for people with disabilities. “Most chose to stay based on their experience from past storms that the impact would be manageable,” the report notes. As one respondent described it, “We stayed because it never had been that bad before. Never thought the water would rise like that. It caught us off guard. We were pretty much going by the seat of our pants.”

White says that the “crux of our findings is that independent living centers do a very good job serving people with disabilities, but a lot of times, like anything else, we really don’t attend to other things like emergency preparedness. Conversely, you’ve got a lot of people in the emergency management field that do a very good job but they don’t think about people with disabilities.”

The report notes that four of the six CILs participating in the study had no one on staff with disaster preparedness training and five did not have a plan or procedures to provide services in the event of a disaster. “The one that did have procedures in place reported that they were not written down.” Further, while three CILs reported having a formal or informal relationship with local emergency managers before the storm, “none had a formal plan in place with that agency.”

Only one county-level emergency management office “reported knowing the location of individuals with disabilities in his service area.” No emergency management office interviewed had maintained or had access to lists maintained by CILs or other disability organizations about individuals with disabilities. “CILs reported that communication with other agencies after the storm was both unreliable and inconsistent due to failures of technology, including land and cell phone systems and a lack of pre-disaster communication that would have laid the groundwork for post-disaster communication and action.” The report states unequivocally that “Given the disorganized and fractured nature of the overall response to Katrina by public agencies at the local, state, and federal level that has been documented in numerous reports, it is not surprising that communication at the organization and personal levels was a significant challenge for CILs.”

Off the Radar Screen

“One of the things we found in interviewing emergency management organizations was that they often don’t have people with disabilities on their radar screen—they use this term, ‘special needs’ population,” White says. “The problem is that ‘special needs’ incorporates a lot of different people. Of course you’ve got people with spinal cord injuries and things like that, but you’ve also got women who are pregnant, people that speak English as a second language—you’ve got all these different sub-categories and by the time you get done, ‘special needs’ is almost 50% of the population. If you’ve got that many people included in one category then the question is: What makes them so special? The idea we’re trying to get across is that people need to have a different recognition because someone with a disability has different needs than someone that speaks English as a second language.”

The report is pessimistic, however, about any immediate change: “While significant additional resources at all levels of government directed towards disability issues are warranted, in many cases the hard cold fact is that they are unlikely to be available.” Or, as White puts it, “One of the commonalities between the independent living centers and the emergency management operations is that they are both severely under funded and understaffed. “They key thing is we have nine recommendations,” White says.

“I don’t want this report just to sit on a shelf and get dusty. I want to have people look at it and say, ‘Okay, how do we take these things and start to implement them so that we don’t have situations like Katrina where people with disabilities basically didn’t make it.’ There’s been hundreds of stories where people either drowned or they couldn’t get to higher ground in their chairs…People with cognitive disabilities or older people, people that were living independently in the community and then they got displaced to other communities and they had no advocates with them. Some of them were placed in nursing homes, hundreds and hundreds of miles away and there’s nobody to speak up for them. They’re stuck in these nursing homes. It could be nightmarish.”

Reflecting on his experience in New Orleans, White says, “We drove for miles and miles in the lower 9th Ward and looked around at the total devastation. This is so vivid to these people. I think they had a post traumatic stress disorder. It was so devastating and so overwhelming; the scale of it was just unbelievable.

“If you were going to try to clean up that whole area, there’s almost 20 million cubic tons of waste that that has to be moved somewhere; in some cases I almost think that you have to scratch it and start over. It’s not just the houses that are destroyed; it’s the social fabric of the community, that social capital. It’s like Chernobyl.

“The thing that I heard over and over again was: ‘Don’t forget us. Don’t forget about us. Get the word out, let people know.’”

The report was funded by NIDRR and published by the Research and Training Center on Independent Living at the University of Kansas www.nobodyleftbehind2.org/. NIDRR is part of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services at the US Department of Education.

Rob Ingraham (ringraham@unitedspinal.org) is senior editor.

Toward Preparedness: Nine Recommendations

• Place Statewide Independent Living Centers (SILCs) in a leadership role in bringing together local CILs, emergency planning agencies, and disability organizations for information sharing, coordination, and disaster preparedness for people with disabilities
• Initiate a campaign for local and state emergency managers to separate the needs of people with disabilities from other “vulnerable populations.”
• Staff and consumers of CILs should implement systematic training and education to increase personal disaster plans among people with disabilities
• Develop an education and training curriculum around disaster response and recovery plans for CILs across the country
• User-friendly, evidence-based research finding should be made available to assist CILs and other community-based organizations understand how existing emergency planning and responses teams around the country operate
• Have state emergency management officials designate one or more disability contacts at city and county level as primary contacts for inclusion in Emergency Operations Centers when they are activated
• Identify persons with disabilities in need of additional services in a disaster and develop systems to link these people to required services
• Identify functional supports, including accessible transportation, durable medical equipment, alternative communications systems and accessible shelters for persons in a disaster and develop systems to link these person to the services required.
• Investments must be made at the community level to provide back-up community supports for persons with disabilities whose abilities to function independently depends on maintaining access to social and medical services.