Planning for Disaster Response

“I do what I do with a passion because I feel a tremendous obligation and responsibility. What I bring to the table is long-standing experience and knowledge of the disability community—that is, a true singular understanding as a member of that community—matched with years of experience in emergency management planning and application. My career brings those things together.”

Certainly the attacks of September 11, 2001, thrust Elizabeth Davis’s focal concern into American living rooms: we could not and cannot escape the need to plan for disasters. We started thinking explicitly about the vulnerability of our workplaces, hospitals, schools and transportation networks as well as our homes. We asked pointed questions about who would spring into organized action to help us in the case of an “incident,” implementing a plan we assumed would be well-designed and fully resourced. Then Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Tom Ridge told us that we owned responsibility for a prepared response, at least at the family level. Since then the issue has only gained momentum as we witness events, natural and manmade, that affect thousands every day.

About one-fifth of the U.S. population, 54 million Americans, are persons with disabilities, individuals with an array of needs as well as abilities who, nonetheless, are particularly anxious about their personal safety in an emergency, according to two Harris Surveys done by the National Organization on Disability in 2001 and 2003. Elizabeth Davis runs her own emergency management consulting firm. She focuses on planning and response with and for populations that have special needs.

Within our communities, among our neighbors, relatives and friends, one out of every five Americans has a disability or medical need that should be taken into account in developing and carrying out emergency plans. Within the fraction of New York City staked out as “Ground Zero,” for example—in addition to the towers of businesses that included workers with mobility/physical, sensory (i.e. vision or hearing), and cognitive disabilities—were the following considerations:

“Special needs can create dynamic issues for emergency professionals responding during (or to) a crisis,” Elizabeth explains. “Their bottom line is to save lives but that means all lives. Better-laid plans maximize and utilize scarce resources during emergencies; these plans identify the needs as well as the abilities within the disability community. This is not just a victim model for planning: the extent to which you empower people to respond to the best of their abilities, you minimize the amount of response required from professionals, and stretch the availability of all kinds of resources.”

Elizabeth points to the Chinese character that relates “opportunity and crisis” when she teases out the circumstances, both challenging and fortuitous, that led to her national prominence in a specialized field.

“My dyslexia—I am so dyslexic that the only reason I can tell the difference between a “b” and a “d” is that my last name begins with a “d”—led me to request a language waiver at Milton,” Elizabeth says with a grin. “Rather, I requested a language substitution, and Milton agreed. I substituted American Sign Language, which I studied at Northeastern on weekends, for modern foreign language.” At Barnard College, Elizabeth concentrated in sociology and political science, and wrote her thesis on deaf studies. Her intention at Boston University Law School was to develop the skill set necessary to commit herself further to the field of disability rights and disability law. In addition to her law degree, she earned a master’s in education, focused on deaf cultural studies.

“At the end of my graduate career, some effective pieces of legislation passed in the ’70s and ’80s culminated in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, a strong piece of civil rights legislation, and I benefited from the hard work that went into its passage.” Elizabeth’s first job was not as a lawyer; she joined the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD) as assistant to legal counsel and senior policy analyst. That job combined advocacy and application of policy for the disability community, along with legal and analytical work. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Mayor Giuliani identified emergency management as a commitment housed under mayoral authority, and created the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM). As the MOPD representative to the Office of Emergency Management, Elizabeth provided “structured advice and review” as she describes her role; she “incorporated disability access standards and protocol into the city’s emergency contingency plans, drills and outreach programs.”

Her shift from a policy analyst to a frontline emergency response professional came when she was called upon to help resolve a crisis in Queens in 1997 where police had found a group of 64 deaf Mexicans who had ostensibly been smuggled into the country and forced into slave labor. Elizabeth found that she “held the communication key” in that situation—the ability to help responders, as well as Mayor Giuliani, sort through complex legal, cultural and social needs, to set priorities, and to initiate an appropriate response. The need for emergency management planning to include disability concerns was manifest. At that point Elizabeth became a member of the Office of Emergency Management, the organization with the resources and the authority to bring together teams for planning and responding. “My duty was to infuse consideration of disabilities within the emergency management structure, whether the disabilities were medically based, age based, or other kinds of special needs.” She ensured that, within the system, trained people were capable of responding to unique issues, whatever the triggering factor: a power outage, a water main break, a blizzard.

The extreme and immediate needs emanating from the attacks of September 11, 2001, wrenched Elizabeth, who had been transitioning into her own private consulting firm, back into frontline response at ground zero. The Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, as many remember, was located at 7 World Trade Center, which ultimately fell. She surrendered the effort to “achieve more balance” in her life through tailoring her own business to the imminent and overwhelming months-long demand in response to this crisis.

Once Elizabeth was again ready to launch her business, the nation was consumed with the need to plan. One goal in establishing EAD & Associates, LLC Emergency Management & Special Needs Consult-ants, Elizabeth says was to “be selective about projects—to take on projects because of the overall impact they would have. I could take my experience to the largest and most effective emergency management venues, and apply that experience to make a difference.” As principal of EAD & Associates, Elizabeth has worked with private businesses, advocacy organizations, and governmental agencies in many states and at the federal level.

Elizabeth just completed a three-year project with the National Organization on Disability, the “Emergency Preparedness Initiative,” which perhaps most successfully epitomizes the philosophy and strategies that drive Elizabeth’s work.

“We had two parallel goals,” Elizabeth says, “we wanted to educate individuals with disabilities to be better prepared to act on behalf of their own needs, and then to be part of the solution process, whether the incident was an apartment fire, an ice storm or an act of terrorism. We empowered them to search out the planning agencies in their municipalities, and participate in shaping the solutions to emergency challenges. The other arm of the initiative was to address the emergency management professionals—the planners and first responders—to make them aware of the unique emergency special needs they might face that may change the dynamic of their response, and help them develop more appropriate plans, with the stakeholders at the planning table.”

Working closely with the Department of Homeland Security has predictably been a consistent feature of Elizabeth’s consulting. Last September she chaired a major conference on emergency preparedness for people with disabilities for the National Capital Region (Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland), supported by the Department of Homeland Security in partnership with the National Organiza-tion on Disability. Emergency management professionals from throughout the region and beyond immersed themselves in crucial issues, from plans for medically fragile populations to alert systems, evacuation issues, impacts of disaster responses on pediatric and senior populations, to workplace models. This conference is an example of a unique “window of opportunity,” Elizabeth says, that she and her colleagues now have and must use effectively.

For Elizabeth, and her peers and colleagues in both the emergency management and disability communities, the most significant symbol of their success in this area was Executive Order 13347, signed by President Bush in July 2004. Elizabeth was present in the Oval Office for the signing and feels that the tremendous impact of this order is both recognition of the issues and a commitment to positive change. The presidential order directs that people with disabilities must be included in all aspects of emergency planning at all levels, throughout the nation.

“Emergencies are never going to be easy, and there is always going to be a response,” Elizabeth advises, “but if you at least have the knowledge and the ideas ahead of time, you can be better equipped to make the decisions that affect people’s lives. A strategic and inclusive approach to emergency preparedness benefits people of all abilities.”

Cathleen Everett

 

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