Guest Blog: Paul Timmons – It’s Time to Stop Playing Nice With the Emergency Management Community After Continued Failure to Serve Disabled Disaster Victims

The problem with disaster preparedness and response work is that it is extremely difficult to get people to care until we have an event at hand.

But if you’re one of the crips who can’t access one of those shelters Susan Dooha told us about, you’re gonna care a lot….right up to the point you die in the storm.

In countless media appearances after hurricane Ike, I said that the biggest lesson we learned from Ike was that we hadn’t learned anything from Katrina, three years earlier.  Not a single ‘special needs shelter’ in Houston was accessible. Well, another three years have passed and…here we go again.

I guess there’s supposed to be some solace knowing they don’t call them ‘special needs shelters’ anymore.  But, frankly, I’d be willing to give that up if crips could actually get into them and take, well, shelter.

Millions of dollars have been spent on the subject since Katrina.   Seriously…millions.   Conferences have been held…conference calls have been had…’plans’ have been laid….press releases have been released….promissory ‘contracts’ have been signed, amidst great fanfare….and it’s been discussed ad nauseum.  And yet, just a few days ago, a leader in our greatest city finds that, as a practical matter, it has all been for naught.

And it’s not just Irene.  We have seen it in every domestic disaster to which we’ve responded.  Alabama, North Georgia, Joplin, the Florida and Mid-Western floods.  There’s always a lot of talk and posturing from FEMA and state and local emergency response types…while crips suffer…and die.

I had high hopes that FEMA would become an effective bully pulpit on this issue.  But it hasn’t happened.  My view is that FEMA is so hopelessly dysfunctional that even the best intentioned people can’t really do much with it.  In fact, all the vapid chest thumping on this issue is dangerous.  It creates a false sense of accomplishment.

The fact that there’s somebody in a wheelchair sitting in on the meetings makes everybody feel all warm and fuzzy.  But almost always, any attention to people with disabilities stops there.

And there’s this:  Every time somebody throws us a bone…we go hide in the corner and quietly play with it.

So….What’s to be done?

Well….we have to stop playing nice. 

Some of this stuff is probably actionable.  So let’s sue somebody.

Let’s engage in direct action on the issue.  And let’s start at FEMA HQ in DC. And local, state and national Red Cross offices.  And city, county and state emergency management offices.

Let’s create our own infrastructure…operate our own shelters……..take care of ourselves.

We have the people power and networks to fix this.  What we don’t have, yet, is an understanding of this fact:  The Overlords of the emergency management community have shown to an indisputable certainty that they don’t really care whether we live or die. 

And ya know what?  As I wrote that last line, it occurred to me: it’s not entirely accurate.  The reality is…they’re actually trying to kill us.