Emergency Evacuation Preparedness: Taking Responsibility For Your Safety A Guide For People with Disabilities and Other Activity Limitations
Avoid Avoidance
Integrate disaster planning into your life. Avoid the universal human tendency to not think about possible emergencies.
September 11, 2001 is just one more wake‑up call for the disability community, requiring us to pay attention to these issues. Unfortunately these wake‑up-calls only have a shelf life of 6 - 12 months and then people seem to slip back into old ways, back into complacency and back to a denial mode. That is, ignoring the threat and avoiding thinking about it because it creates stress, fear and apprehension. (Kailes 1996)
There is a universal human tendency to avoid thinking about possible emergencies. This avoidance has greater consequences for people with disabilities than for people without disabilities.
When disaster strikes, systems on which everyone relies don't function as well as they usually do, otherwise we'd call them something besides disasters (inconveniences, maybe). In a major emergency or disaster, hazards are often multiplied for people with disabilities. In fact, all people are suddenly confronted with a wide range of new disabling conditions. (Kailes 1996)
The immediate temporary response of increased sales of evacuation devices as well as businesses and building managers dusting off their safety plans and taking a new look at how they can assure their workers' safety, needs to become a regular activity.
Disaster and emergency planning is an activity that should be integrated into our lives (the same way we are encouraged to check our smoke alarm batteries when we change the clocks for daylight savings time). These activities need to be integrated into the fabric of organizations so that emergency plans are created and regularly reviewed, rehearsed, practiced, evaluated and revised.
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