As the remainders of Hurricane Dennis rolled over Madison, I wrote about how natural disasters impact people with disabilities. Now that Katrina simply devestated New Orleans, I’m reminded of the assignment.
The assignment took the shape of an informal journal (I wrote other entries as well that I may share). Thus, even though I wrote it for a grad school, this is not really academic writing. Then again is it possible to get academic writing out of a former-journalist hack such as myself?
I’ll try to break this up into two pieces later…
Natural Disasters and Disabilties and how the lessons can apply to libraries.
As the remnants of Hurricane Dennis dumps rain on our Ohio River town, I am glad it didn’t pack the punch of Hurricane Ivan. This time around far less damage was experienced and no deaths have been reported. Even with Dennis raining on my head and taking this class I had not thought about how natural disasters could impact people with disabilities until my wife read me an article from CNN.com.
The article was about a woman from Pensacola, Florida, who lost her mother during Hurricane Ivan only to find herself in the crosshairs of Hurricane Dennis 11 months later.
Betty Jurnigan’s mother was bed-ridden as result of heart disease. By the time she realized Pensacola was in the path of Hurricane Ivan, all the critical care shelters were full. So Jurnigan and her fiancé decided to stay with her mother in their wood framed home just miles from the intracoastal waterway.
As the storm ripped into their home, they sought final shelter in their bathtub. Minutes later their home was destroyed and they were thrown into the hurricane flood waters. They had not expect the 20-foot wall of water from the storm surge. Jurnigan barely survived and is still recovering from her injuries. Her mother did not survive.
The story for me outlined the extreme danger Mother Nature can pose to people who are elderly, ill or have disabilities—let alone the healthy and able as Jurnigan was. It also outlines the definite need for pro-active planning, both on a macro and micro scale.
In exploring the topic, I started with an article by Nieli Langer from the journal Educational Gerontology. Langer analyzed the societal reasons and possible solutions to the string of 700 deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave and the 13,000 deaths in France during the 2003 European heat wave.
Langer believes the reason these human disasters occurred is that the elderly and disabled are falling through holes in the safety net. Indeed, she believes, we are seeing a new generation of “elderly orphans” as extended family units and neighborliness break down in modern society.
Historically, she writes, the adult children (specifically daughters and daughters-in-law) have provided elderly parents with care. However, with societal changes, the daughters are now working and may live across the country. As a result children are overall less able to provide the care for their parents. Similarly, neighbors today are less likely to notice when things go wrong in the lives of their fellow neighbors.
Combine this lack of care with a general reluctance of the elderly to seek care from professionals and trouble ensues. She wrote that cultural barriers also exist in providing care. Oddly, she even found evidence of doctors and service providers trying to avoid providing services to the elderly—possibly to avoid the pain of losing patients.
Langer quotes studies that show the seniors who are the most likely to receive care are those who have others recommending it to them. She believes the solution, therefore, should be to bridge this gap through neighborhood and senior citizen organizations. For example, block captains in neighborhoods can keep an eye out for danger signs such as newspapers piling up on porches.
Also, organizations, such as the successful Retired Seniors Volunteers Program, can provide peer-to-peer help and counseling to people in need. She writes that seniors are often more comfortable talking with someone their own age than someone who is younger. Indeed, she adds, the shared life experiences and understanding can go a long way toward getting the person the help they might need.
Fran Marscher, a retired newspaper editor and author of two non-fiction books on hurricanes, argued in an opinion column in the Christian Science Monitor that government needs to take a role as well. She believes local authorities need to be a lot stricter about building and development standards in hurricane prone areas—especially because thousands of elderly people are locating to the warm Florida climate each week.
On Aug. 19, 2004 she wrote “Hurricane Charley demonstrated last weekend why some of the nation’s most vulnerable folk – the ill, the disabled, and the frail elderly – should think twice before taking up residence in the most dangerous parts of the hurricane-prone coastal regions.”
Communities usually get some warning of a hurricane. Hurricane Charley, however, took many by surprise when it quickly turned eastward and ripped across southern Florida . As a result, Charlotte County received little warning and there was little time for many to evacuate. Entire mobile home developments were destroyed. Three hospitals were “rendered useless” in the process.
Even when warnings are given, evacuation procedures are nothing short of a painful ordeal—boarding up windows, packing necessities, long lines at the gas station and traffic jams. Marscher argued that even for healthy retirees preparing for a hurricane and its aftermath can be overwhelming. If their retirement homes are destroyed—then what?
Marscher worries that there are more than 700 nursing homes in Florida coastal regions. She believes they either need to be located further inland or be forced to be built or retrofitted with walls capable of withstanding hurricane force winds.
While these proactive moves can help communities avoid human disasters during natural disasters, the moves are often unpopular as they eliminate popular development areas or force property owners to engage in expensive alterations to their projects. Nonetheless, I think they are needed. It comes down to two questions. Should taxpayers have to bail out property owners who carelessly build in dangerous areas? Does the ability to build cheaply outweigh the possible cost of life lost? For me the answer is no to both questions.
Another examples of governmental planning can be found in the registration of people with disabilities and illness in case of evacuations. In Palm Beach County the government is asking residents with disabilities to pre-register for emergency transportation in case of hurricane evacuations. If an evacuation was ordered each person would receive a phone call to arrange transportation. I found the brochure the county distributed explaining how to register and outlined where shelters were located and what necessities to bring. Prior to Hurricane Dennis, the Hernando County Emergency Management Services agency had the local paper repeatedly publish requests for people to register for the county’s special needs shelter if they needed medical care in the event of an evacuation. Even if an evacuation is impossible, I believe having these lists could help rescue authorities prioritize efforts.
Disaster plans for hospitals, meanwhile, are extremely complicated and expensive. For patients, evacuations are a discomfort at best and a horror at worst. In coastal Florida some hospitals are able to evacuate patients to facilities inland. However, Marscher quoted examples in her article where evacuations were impossible. During Hurricane Hugo in 1989, Marscher wrote about the Medical University of South Carolina’s teaching hospital in Charleston where “nurses gathered patients into the corridors and huddled around them while orderlies leaned against the doors to keep the wind and rain away from the beds.”
For the Nephrology Nursing Journal, Susan Robertson explored the micro-level of planning required by hospitals in disasters. She interviewed representatives from several San Francisco-area dialysis centers about their experiences during and following the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake in October 1989.
Having read the interviews, I consider it a minor miracle the patients undergoing dialysis received back all their own blood. Working in the dark, technicians had to manually crank back the blood before evacuations could proceed.
Little lessons that had big consequences were learned. For example, lock down machines and wheelchairs during use. One patient nearly had the needles dislodged from his arm as the machine rolled forward and his wheelchair rolled backwards. He leaped out of his chair to grab the machine.
The biggest lesson learned was to have a plan and then make sure everyone knows what the plan is and how it works. Several factors should be included:
- Basic procedures such as evacuation routes and methods of working with patients.
- Methods of keeping patients and staff safe. For example, where and how do you take cover in a disaster.
- Identify means of keeping the environment safe in a disaster. For example, what items need to be locked down to avoid having them fall into escape paths or flying through the air.
- Identify resources to call upon in an emergency. For example, are there other units that can help with evacuation of patients?
- Insure good communication—not only among staff members but also with patients and outside resources such as police and fire departments and the national guard. Having each partner in the plan understanding exactly what is needed of them is absolutely crucial.
- Finally, instill the need to remain calm at all times.
I personally think remaining calm in an emergency is extremely important. An attitude of calm is comforting. It tells everyone we know what we’re doing and we are working to make you safe. While calm may not be a contagious attitude, panic certainly is.
I believe a lot of these lessons can be applied to libraries to better serve patrons with disabilities.
On the societal level, we can be among the people who care about our neighbors/patrons by providing caring and confidential reference services and outreach services to the homebound.
On the proactive planning side, we need to insure that all areas of the library area not only accessible, but also escapable. A narrow aisle between stacks might be accessible to someone in a wheelchair, but how hard is it to get out of in an emergency.
Finally, for when emergencies occur, the whole staff needs to be able to instantly implement the plan and communicate effectively with all invested parties—the staff, the patrons and emergency providers. For example, we need to insure there are multiple ways of warning patrons. In addition to sirens, there should also be bright flashing lights operating on battery power. This would not only highlight locations of escape routes during power failures, but also alert patrons who may be deaf.
Obviously, all of this sees the person with disabilities as the victim of Mother Nature. However, as noted in our class lectures, if we remember to focus on people’s strengths amazing things can be accomplished. Case in point is Larson Watts of Alpharetta, Georgia.
Watts, who has used a wheelchair for several years due to a slowly progressive form of muscular dystrophy, regularly takes time off from his fulltime job to volunteer as a unit director for the Georgia Baptist Disaster Relief team. In a time of a natural disaster, Watts appears on the scene the night before everyone else to set up the control center. The next day he is ready to coordinates the team’s efforts:
.bq The (volunteers) expect Watts to be set up and organized so he can hand them work orders…
According to Watts, “a lot of the volunteers say they don’t feel like going, but they know I’ll be there. I challenge people,” he says. “They are a pretty special group of people who give their time and efforts, and in a lot of cases, their own money to help people they don’t know.” Volunteering to help others in time of natural disaster gives Watts great satisfaction. “It would be hard to imagine anything more fulfilling,” he says. “If you ever go on one disaster, you’ll be back.”
Associated Press. 2005. “Scarred Ivan survivors face Dennis: Floor was roiling up and down like a roller coaster.” CNN.com. 9 July. Accessed from: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/07/09/hurricane.survivor.ap/ on July 10, 2005.
Langer, Nieli. 2004. Natural disasters that reveal cracks in our social foundation. Educational Gerontology 30 (April): 275–285.
Marscher, Fran. 2004.
Our most vulnerable citizens don’t belong in hurricane danger zones. Christian Science Monitor. 19 August, 9. Academic Search Elite.
Palm Beach County Board of Commissioners. 2002. Disabled transportation assistance program for hurricane evacuations. Palm Beach County, Florida. accessed from: http://www.pbcgov.com/images/Hurricane/2002Eng.pdf on July 11, 2005.
Register now to stay at special needs shelter. Hernando (Florida) Times, published on various pages on June 24, 27 and July 1, 3, 6 and 9. Lexis-Nexis.
Robertson, Susan L. 2001. Dialysis and disaster: San Francisco’s dialysis community remembers the Loma Pieta earthquake. Nephrology Nursing Journal 28 (October): 515-520. Academic Search Elite.
Thorsen-Snipes, Nanette. 1998. When Disaster Strikes. Accent on Living 43 (Summer): 62-66. Academic Search Elite.