ADA Best Practices Tool Kit for State and Local Governments

A. Advance Planning

• Equal access requires advance planning. During emergencies and disasters, people with disabilities sometimes have different, disability-related needs than other individuals. Many of these needs cannot be met during emergencies and disasters without advance planning. For example, if a person’s health will be jeopardized without access to life-sustaining medication that must be refrigerated, an emergency shelter will be of little use to him unless he has access to the required medication and a way to keep it sufficiently cold. Resources of this kind will likely be unavailable unless emergency managers and shelter operators arrange to have them available well before an emergency or disaster occurs. 
  
  To provide equal access to people with disabilities, effective advance planning requires at least two steps: (1) identify the disability-related needs of the residents and visitors likely to be housed in a shelter, and (2) make the advance arrangements necessary to meet those needs in the event an emergency or disaster strikes. The most effective way for emergency managers and shelter operators to ensure that advance planning addresses the needs of people with disabilities in their community is to involve community members with a wide variety of disabilities in the advance planning process. These individuals will be able to identify the types of disability-related needs that community residents and visitors are likely to have during emergencies as well as some of the community resources that may be available to help meet those needs. 
  
  To help in the advance planning process, the following sections of this Addendum identify some of the more common disability-related needs that shelter residents are likely to have. However, since people with different disabilities will typically have different needs, the issues addressed in this document are not exhaustive. Each community will have disability-related issues specific to its own residents and visitors that need to be identified and addressed. These issues are also likely to change over time as residents move into and out of communities and as changes occur in the types of equipment, medication, and technology that people with disability use.