Disaster Preparedness for Individuals with Disabilities. Presenter: Jacquie Brennan. >> LAUREL: Good afternoon. This is Laurel Richards with ILRU in Houston; and we're glad you could join us today for our presentation on disaster preparedness. Speaking of disasters, if you're on a page on the link and it says knowledge translation dissemination, that's not the correct page and what we are going to ask you to do is to go to the webcast calendar page and click on the presentation that says "this presentation is being rescheduled for early 2007" and click on that link and click on the go to webcast link and you're going to be right with us and you'll just be perfect. Or you can disregard what's there and stay on that page or you can -- those of how don't need to read the captioning can just turn off your monitor or ignore it. Just don't go away. We're going to do this presentation and it's won of the best that we've had in terms of looking at disasters and figuring out how a person with disabilities can survive, do well, not get caught up in terrible confusion. Today's presentation is a product of the rehabilitation Research and Training Center on health and wellness and those folks are located at the Oregon Health and Sciences University in Oregon. It's sponsored by NIDRR, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. It's part of the commitment to disseminating research findings to people who are typically not researchers, and that goes for those of us who are service providers, trainers, consumers, family members, everybody that doesn't qualify as a researcher. And I think that's a handful. What we'll do today is make a presentation -- we have a presentation by Jacquie Brennan and if you have questions, you can see on the link if you have the link in front of you, it says you can click here to submit questions. Feel free to submit questions at any time. And Jacquie will simply let us know when she's ready to accept them. Also, if you run into any problems whatsoever, you can get technical assistance -- we have people on stand-by to do technical assistance and we urge you to give us a call. You can use the regular telephone number or you can use the TTY number. The telephone -- the voice telephone is (713)520-0232. That's (713)520-0232. The TTY is (713)520-5136. don't hesitate to call if for any reason, if its starts buffering and it seems like it's buffering for 30 minutes, call. If you can't get a good sound, call. If you can't figure out how to get to the right window, just call. We've got people on stand-by who are ready to take your call and help you. So with that much, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Jacquie Brennan. Jacquie, as you can see, if you were able to see her -- the information about Jacquie's background, she's joined ILRU a little over a year ago when Katrina and hurricanes Katrina and Rita kind of knocked us for a loop, especially our gulf coast neighbors, and we were receiving -- FEMA was referring to us all the calls they would get from people who had disabilities. Well, Jacquie came on board to coordinate that whole effort and its has been a member of our team since and luckily we were able to talk her into staying full time. So Jacquie, who is an attorney, who has children who have disabilities, is extremely familiar with disability law and is a member of the DBTAC, the ADA TA center. So Jacquie, with sort of an abbreviated introduction, I'd like to give it to you with one caveat to our audience members. I would suggest if you haven't already to download the -- what's called the PowerPoint or the slide program, but it's a series -- the handouts are excellent and it will help you as we move through the presentation in terms of note taking and it's something that you will want to keep after this presentation. It's very sound information. Jacquie... anyway, I'll turn it over to you, Jacquie Brennan. >> JACQUIE: Thanks a lot, Laurel. I am going to go through the PowerPoint that is -- the link to which is on the website, but if you don't have it in front of you, don't worry about it. I'm actually going to read every single word that's on it. So you'll get the information and you can download it later if you want to, if that's more convenient. There are at the end of it some really good websites and I'm not going to read out those long website addresses, so they'll be there for you to go and find so that you can get to some more resources. You know they have like week long seminars on disaster preparation, so we're not going to be able to cover everything in an hour or an hour and a half, but we'll hit some good highlights I think and maybe stimulate further discussion and for sure questions. I'm going to get through the presentation before I take any questions so that I can make sure we don't run short of time, but whatever questions you have, even if we don't get time to answer them all, I'll still answer everything by E-mail and of course I can't -- these webcasts are always so different for somebody who is used to speaking in front of groups because I can't see you and I can't ask you any questions to make sure you're paying attention. So I'll be bothering Laurel a lot with questions to make sure she at least hasn't dozed off over there. >> LAUREL: I'm awake. I'm awake. >> JACQUIE: Good girl. So to start off, I do want to say a word of thanks to a few people and entities. ILRU at Memorial Hermann TIRR has -- I've gotten a lot of information from this group of people throughout, you know, the whole time that I've been doing this work with disaster preparation. I want the thank June Kailes for a lot of information. She's the smartest woman I know on this stuff. JAN's employer's guide for evacuation plans is an excellent resource and there is a link to that at the end of the PowerPoint and JAN is the job ake date network. If you don't know about them, you should learn more about them. And Time Magazine had a wonderful -- wonderful article on disaster preparation and sort of why we don't prepare and I'm quoting at length from that at the beginning of this particularly. I just got a note from Dawn who says she wants me to repeat the information about the links. This is if you want to have a screen up that -- well, the link to the webcast that's on the page where it has my webcast listed, it's there, and if you go to that, you'll eventually on the left-hand side of that get the screen that will be to my webcast and it will have my name at the beginning, but I guess at this point you'll be seeing closed captioning, but it will be of the words I'm saying now. That reminds me to slow down a little for the captioner. But if you want a link -- and on that link it will have knowledge translation, which was actually the webcast that we had last week. >> LAUREL: And a wonderful one, Jacquie. >> JACQUIE: It was and I listened to it. But that information is not of course relevant to our discussion today. So if you don't want to be looking at that while we're having this discussion, you can go to -- back to the webcast page where all the different webcasts are listed and you can go to the one that says Medicaid managed care being rescheduled for early 2007 and click on that. Use that page to go to the webcast and it will just bring up the smaller screen that just will have the closed captioning. Okay, I think that's enough on that. I don't think we're going to go through that anymore. Wherever you are now and I'm sure is fine, unless you need the captioning, you don't even need to look at the monitor while we're talking unless you are somehow following along with the webcast. Every July the country's leading disaster scientists and emergency planners gather in bolder, Colorado for what is an invitation only workshop. You have to picture 440 people who are obsessed with the tragic and the safe, people who get excited about earthquake shake maps and righteous about flood insurance. After September 11th, 2001, the people at this Bolder conference decried the nation's sort of myopic focus on terrorism and they lamented the decline of FEMA and they warned, to the point of cliche, that a major hurricane would destroy New Orleans. But it was a convention of prophets without any disciples because the real challenge in the United States today is not predicting catastrophe. That we can do. The challenge that apparently lies beyond our grasp is to prepare for them. So all of you are taking a really important step in the right direction today just by tuning in to this webcast on preparation. We have what Time Magazine called a national culture of unpreparedness. Dennis Moletti ran the disaster center for many years and he has warned people so they will listen. He is semi-retired but he comes back to the workshop in Bolder every year to preach what has become his gospel. And this last July he was very direct. He said how many citizens must die? How many people do you need to see pounding through their roofs? Like most people there, Moletti was heart broken by Katrina and he knows he will be heart broken again. He said we know exactly where the major disasters will occur but individuals will underperceive the risk. The conventional wisdom is that humans get serious about avoiding disasters only after one has just smacked them across the face, but by that logic, 2006 should have been a break through year for rational behavior because Americans watched Katrina, which was the most expensive disaster in U.S. history on live T. V. And anyone who didn't know it before should have learned that bad things can happen. And they are made much worse by our own lack of ambition and our reluctance to work together before everything goes wrong. Granted, some amount of delusion is probably part of the human condition. In 8063 Pompeii was seriously damaged and people went to work rebuilding in the exact same spot until they were buried altogether by a volcano 16 years later. So a review of the past year in disaster history suggests that modern Americans are particularly mysteriously bad at protecting themselves from guaranteed threats. We know more than we ever did about the dangers that we face; but it turns out that in times of crisis our greatest enemy is rarely the storm or the earthquake or the surge itself. Most often it is ourselves. So what has happened in the year that's followed Katrina, Rita and Wilma? Well, in New Orleans, the Army Corps of engineers has worked day and night like men baling a sinking ship literally to rebuild the bull works. They have got the flood walls and levees to where they were before Katrina, more or less. That's not enough. We can now safe with confidence, but it probably is all that can be expected from one year of really monumental hustle. Meanwhile, New Orleans officials have to their credit crafted a plan using buses and trains to evacuate the sick, the disabled and the carless, the people that don't have transportation before the next big hurricane. The city estimates that 15,000 people will need a ride out of New Orleans. State officials, though, have not yet determined where the trains and buses will take everyone. Negotiations with neighboring communities are ongoing and they are very difficult. We talk about building codes -- I guess more encouraging is the fact that Louisiana has managed to pass mandatory building codes this year. Most states already have such codes. Florida has had a strict one that's been in place since 2001 and structures built under that code tend to be the ones that are left standing after a 120-mile per hour wind rips through. We know that for every dollar spent on that kind of basic mitigation, society saves an average of four dollars and that's according to a 2005 report by the nonprofit national institute of building sciences. But then there is Mississippi which, believe it or not, still has no statewide mandatory building codes. Katrina destroyed 68,729 houses many Mississippi, but this year a proposed mandatory code which was posed by many builders and real estate lobbyists and homeowners even ended up as a voluntary code. At the same time though Mississippi has helped coastal towns develop creative plans for rebuilding more intelligently, New Orleans, however, still has no central agency or person that's in charge of rebuilding. The city's planning office is down to nine people from 24 before Katrina. And it really needs 65 according to the American planning association. And the imperative to rebuild the wetlands that protect against storms, much discussed in the weeks right after Katrina, and just as important as the levees gets less and less attention every day. The gulf coast is not prepared for the next big storm, and in the months since Katrina, the rest of the U.S. has not proved to be a quicker study than the gulf coast. There is still no federal law requiring state and local officials to plan for the evacuation of the sick, elderly, poor or individuals with disabilities; but earlier this year, both houses of Congress triumphantly and with a great deal of fanfare, passed bills that require locals to plant plan for the evacuation of pets. In June, the Department of Homeland Security released an unprecedented analysis of state and urban emergency plans around the country, including assessments of evacuation plans and command structures. The report concluded that most cannot be characterized as fully adequate, feasible or acceptable. The worst performers were Dallas, New Orleans and Oklahoma City, and by far the best was Florida. And it isn't just the bureaucrats. In a Time poll, half of those poled said they had experienced a natural disaster or emergency, but only 16 percent said they were very well prepared for the next one. Of the rest, about half the people said their lack of preparedness was based on the fact that they don't live in a high risk area. But in fact, 91 percent of Americans live in places at a moderate to high risk for earthquakes, volcanoes, tornados, wild fires, hurricanes, flooding, high wind damage or terrorism, according to an estimate by the hazards and vulnerability research institute as the University of South Carolina. But Americans have a tendency to be die hard optimists, literally. It's part of what makes the country great, and part of what makes the country so Vincible. Eric Holderman came up with what I think is the best -- the very best description of why we don't plan. He is the director of emergency management for Seattle's King County which faces a significant earthquake threat. He says the four stages of disaster denial are: It won't happen here; even if it happens here, it won't happen to me; even if it happens to me, it won't be that bad; and even if it's that bad, there is nothing I could have done about it any way. And so people use those stages to keep from planning, and we see it all the time. And I use that -- I use those four stages of disaster denial all the time. There is a thought that really I guess conventional wisdom that people -- particularly in Katrina -- people were too poor to evacuate. That's were more people didn't evacuate, that they were too poor, but a recent survey in eight hurricane prone states showed that -- I'm sorry, Dawn just passed me another note -- but a recent survey showed that other forces may be at play. The survey, which was led by Robert Blendon, who is a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health tried to determine what, if anything, would get people out of their homes in the face of another disaster like Katrina. And overall, 33 percent of the people said they would not leave or they were not sure whether they would leave if an evacuation order was given. And homeowners, 39 percent of homeowners were particularly stubborn. Lack of funds and lack of transportation -- those things definitely are factor for people who stay behind. But according to this poll, the greater consideration is just a vague belief that their home is built well enough to survive a storm, and 68 percent of people offered that as their justification for staying. >> LAUREL: My goodness. >> JACQUIE: They just thought their home -- it doesn't matter what they've seen on T. V, what other people's homes might be like, any of the warnings, they think they will be okay. So they stay. 66 percent were also confident that if they stayed at home they would eventually be rescued and that was a fate that is hardly justified by the Katrina experience, but ours is a strange culture of irrational distrust that is buoyed by irrational optimism. Heat waves bring out the same kind of self-delusion. Scott Sheridan, professor of geography at Kent State studied heat wave behavior particularly on senior citizens who are at risk in hot weather. And he did this in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Toronto and Dayton and he found that less than half of the people 65 and older abided by heat emergency recommendations like drinking lots of water, and the reason they didn't abide by the recommendations was they didn't consider themselves to be old. So when they heard about if you're elderly you should do this, they just didn't pay attention because they didn't consider themselves to be elderly. So there is this self-delusion about all kinds of different disasters. Kathleen Tierney, the head of the natural hazard center said we as human societies have yet to understand that nature doesn't care, and for that reason we must care. People with disabilities are not currently included in emergency planning on a big scale. And little, if any, communication exists between the people who are in charge of planning and the disability communities, and I find this to be true at all levels, whether it's a state government making emergency plans or whether it's an employer who is making an emergency plan. Very often, people with disabilities -- more often than not -- people with disabilities are not at the table for those plans. People with disabilities have a big variety of communication, support and health needs that differentiate them from persons without disabilities. And this is true probably in everything, not only disaster planning, but for many people, people with disabilities are one thing and that's just not true. People with disabilities have a variety of disabilities and abilities that may make them more or less in need of special assistance for disaster planning. People with disabilities also often live in low income areas and those areas do sometimes include places that are at higher risk for chemical emergencies. Okay, now, how to prepare. The very first thing to think about, long before you are faced with an emergency, is how to leave. People don't think about this in advance. They wait until the emergency is there, and it's so important to think ahead of time about how to leave. Decide how you will leave your house as well as how you will leave your city. Make a drawing of the layout of your house and plan an escape route in the event of a sudden disaster. In a child's room, this layout of an escape route should be posted at a child's eye level, and make a plan of where to meet outside of the house. Either at a neighbor's house or maybe at a neighborhood store a few blocks away. Families get separated in disasters and sometimes even just in house fires, people have been injured and killed going back in to get a family member who they thought was still inside who had simply left by another route and was in another part of the yard or down the street being cared for by a neighbor. And so it's so important to have this meeting spot outside of your house where you know you will meet as you escape your house. For some emergencies or evacuations, you might be instructed to turn off your utilities before you leave your home. So find out in advance not at that moment how to turn off the water to your house, turn off the gas, and turn off the electricity before -- and find out how to do that now before you're in the middle of a disaster. Do not turn your own gas back on though. I just want to give a warning about that. You have to have a professional to turn the gas on. Every family member should have a card with important information on it. There is a sample that is part of the PowerPoint that is published by FEMA, and it's a really good little card that you can make big on the PowerPoint and then print it out if you want to use it. But every family member should have a card with that important information. We helped so many evacuees from New Orleans and it was astonishing really how many didn't have really basic information that they needed to have with them that planning could have resolved. You need to keep important papers in a safe location. It's pretty simple to think about that to keep important papers in a safe location. The hard part is deciding what are important papers, what kind of papers go in that category. So there is a list about what is important in terms of papers. Identification -- a driver's license, a passport. A lot of people because of the way in which Katrina came, and especially how the water rose after the levees broke and people assumed they were safe, people didn't have identification with them and it made it very much harder to get services, to get emergency funds, to get their medications without identification. Lease agreements -- this is something that almost no one thought about taking with them in our experience. And the reason that you need to have it is not because you're going to be trying to hold your landlord to the lease agreement, but it proves residency. >> LAUREL: Oh, good grief. >> JACQUIE: A lot of people couldn't get their -- even the initial emergency funds that FEMA through the Red Cross distributed because they couldn't prove they were a resident. They lived in an bills paid apartment and so they couldn't prove their residency and having a lease agreement would do that. Of course insurance policies -- you don't have to have the policy to make a claim on your insurance, but it really helps to be able to know what is covered and also even know who to contact from your -- from the insurance company. A lot of people, especially in their sort of posttraumatic state couldn't remember who they had insurance with. In fact, I had that experience myself a month ago. I had a wreck and the other person had a certain insurance company and I called them to report that this person had run into me, and she said do you have insurance with us, too? And I said, no, I don't -- but I did. I had just forgot which insurance company I had because your mind is so undone by an emergency that you forget those things. So having those policies is really helpful. Having birth certificates and marriage certificates, divorce papers and especially custody papers for probably obvious reasons, those are very helpful as well. Having guardianship papers is crucial. We had a lot of people who evacuated who did have guardianship over a relative in most cases, but they had no guardianship papers, and of course the court where they had gotten the guardianships didn't operate for a very long time to be able to go down and get copies -- certified copies of those papers. So having those papers with your other important papers is a good idea. Wills, of course, powers of attorney, deeds, immunization records -- in fact, any medical records, property records and social security cards. It's good if you know your social security number, but it's much better to have the actual card with your papers. >> LAUREL: Good fl's, Jacquie, that's a lot. >> JACQUIE: Yeah, it is. And that's why it's not good to think about it after you feel the earthquake shake the ground, you know, or when you know the avalanche is coming or the wild fire is spreading to your area or even when the hurricane is in the gulf, but to actually think about that and put it together in advance. Names and numbers that you should have -- have the name and number of all of your treating physicians. Again, you might think you won't forget, but you might forget and even if you can remember your physician's names, you need to write down their numbers. You need to have your bank information, your account numbers written down, your therapists, your pharmacy -- so important because we -- I mean there was a set upright a way -- well, not as quickly as people who have liked, but fairly quickly, so that pharmacies in other states could fill -- could give refills for prescriptions that people who had evacuated brought; but if they couldn't remember their -- the name of their pharmacy or they couldn't remember the drugs they were taking or the dosages, it made it much, much more difficult. And friends and family numbers -- you know, we all depend on our cell phones now, and we don't memorize phone numbers anymore because we just have to hit a number on our cell phone and it will automatically dial it. And we all have gotten lazy about that, me definitely, so have those numbers written down because you can't depend on your cell phone which may not have service and of course the battery may run down before you get a chance to recharge it and all that. So have those numbers written down separately. If you have important records, especially financial records on your computer, back up that information on to disks or a portable drive -- thumb drive you can take with you so you can have that information wherever you go. That's also good advice for businesses as well. Lots of us probably have a first aid kit, so you should have that first aid kit with all the usual items that if you go to the FEMA website, they have a list of all those items like, you know, bandages and gauze and scissors and those kinds of things. So your first aid kit should have all those regular things, but also should have any prescription medications that you take. This is always recommended, but very difficult to accomplish because for most people, they cannot get an extra bottle of their prescription to keep in a first aid kit. Your insurance won't pay for you to get it refilled twice in a month or maybe it's psychotropic medication where you can never get more than a set amount of, and so that's difficult -- extremely difficult to do -- but the very least you can do is to have in that kit the information about the medication that you need so that when you get to a place where you can get it, you'll have a better chance at getting it. You may even want to consider having a separate kit at work, at home, and even in the car. Your kit for home should have essential food, water and supplies to last at least three days. This kit should be kept in a designated place and you should have it ready to just pick up and go if you have to leave your home quickly. And make sure that everybody in the family knows where the kit is kept so that someone will get it and you won't have to try to explain to someone where it is as you're leaving. And you might want to consider having supplies for sheltering in place if you stay in your home, to have supplies that will last up to two weeks. Because it may be that long before you can get back to anything near normal. If you have -- if you decide to have a kit at work and the FEMA recommendation is definitely to have a kit at work, have it in one container ready to grab and go if there is an emergency and you have to be evacuate your workplace. It should have food and water in the kit and also have comfortable walking shoes at your workplace in case an evacuation requires you to walk long distances. And in your car -- >> LAUREL: You know, Jacquie, when I read that, I automatically Flashed to that image of the New Yorkers when they had the blackout. All those people walking -- just extraordinary. And I was looking at shoes and wondering what, you know -- >> JACQUIE: Exactly. >> LAUREL: You just don't consider it unless somebody like you brings it up as an issue. >> JACQUIE: So I hope that people will think about that. In the car kit, if you -- if you are stranded, you'll be so a happy that you have a kit of emergency supplies in your car it should of food and water and first aid supplies, of course, flares, jumper cables, seasonal supplies like having blankets or having newspaper which actually makes really good insulation if you are stuck in the cold and we've had so many lately tragic stories about that. So having a kit in your car can really help. And don't forget medical equipment. If you have medical equipment, you should make arrangements to take it with you if you have to evacuate. Probably most people on this call have heard some of the real horror stories from Katrina about evacuees who were not able to take their equipment with them and the dozens of wheelchairs that were left at the airport and things like that. It's so sad and just not necessary if you make arrangements in advance if you want to take them with you. If you use medical supplies, then get extras of those and have them in the kit so you don't forget them. Take prescription bottles with you. In case you forget bottles or you can't get to them, have a list with the strengths and the dosages. You'd be surprised or maybe not at how many people don't know the names of their medications or can't remember them after the trauma. I talked to lots of people who in some cases couldn't remember that -- couldn't remember the name of the impairment that they had and definitely couldn't remember the names of the medications and it was obviously so much harder to assist them with getting their medication if they couldn't remember even the names of it. And then especially for people -- elderly people or others who take multiple medications, if they are on 30 different medications, then no one can be expected to remember all of that. So having a list of those can be a real help. You will probably at some point before or during a disaster have to make a decision about whether you're even going to leave. And your decision will probably be based on whether there is time to leave, road conditions and what emergency management officials are advising. Sometimes, of course, there is no warning. So there is no choice about whether to leave or not to leave if you're in the middle of the disaster and there is no choice to make. But when there is a choice, you have to really think about what is being advised and what the conditions are about -- on the road about whether or not you want to leave. Some of the advice is different depending on what the disability is, of course. If you have a hearing impairment, you might need to make special arrangements to receive an alternative to the audible warnings that other people will hear in an emergency. If you have a mobility impairment, you might need to make special arrangements for transportation, and you might want to check in advance on the accessibility of the closest shelters to you. Because we certainly know that not all shelters are accessible even though they should be. If you have life-sustaining medical equipment, you need to make arrangements for that to be with you if you evacuate and if you have special dietary needs, you need to make sure that you have an adequate emergency food supply. If evacuation is even mentioned as a possibility, start gathering what you need to take with you and don't forget things like extra wheelchair batteries, oxygen, catheters, medication and of course food and water for service animals. Registration is -- I would say there is a good bit of controversy over registration. Your community's emergency management office may offer the opportunity for individuals with disabilities to register in a database if they will need special assistance during a disaster because of their disability. Some states have done this already with great success. Others are just starting to do it because of the disasters last year, and if you think you might want to register, be sure to ask what services are promised to people who register and what the consequence is of not registering. I actually have and I'll be happy to send you if you E-mail me a long list of questions that I think are important to ask if your local government -- state or local government is trying to get you to register, but I think those are the most important two questions because in some cases, these registries haven't really been thought through very well, so they just know that they want to register people with disabilities, but they're not sure really why or what it will mean to people. I mean, it's pretty clear that government is not going to say we promise that you will be rescued first if you have a disability. And it's also reasonable to believe that they are not going to say if you don't register we will not rescue you. So it's important to know, really, what they're promising you if you register and what will happen if you don't register. Because inevitably not everyone will be registered. People will move. People will not update their information. So there is a lot of -- in some small, very small communities, it has worked very well really in terms of notification and checking on people. More difficult in larger communities to make a real difference although some have successfully done it. So that's why there is a controversy because they are not all bad and they are not all good. You just need to find out in your area what is promised and what the consequences are. >> LAUREL: Good. >> JACQUIE: If you have pets, and I'm not talking about service animals here, but pets, and if you do have pets, you need to plan in advance for what you will do with your pets by keeping extra pet supplies, keeping up to date veterinary records, making sure your pet is wearing identification and getting a pet carrier. Contact animal shelters in advance to find out about services that they might offer during an evacuation. If you have an idea about where you will go in your area or where you'll go if your area is evacuated, call ahead and find out which hotels will accept pets and where local animal boarding facilities are in the place where you plan to go. And take a description and a photo of your pet with you in case you get separated. And pets are -- it's good to know that pets are not generally permitted in shelters, although more and more shelters are taking pets really as a result of some of the awful things that happened during Katrina and those evacuations. The next slide I call animals of size only because I had a son who has a syndrome -- I won't go into it for those of you who don't know what it is, but suffice it to say he's a big guy and I was going to let him ride a plane and I knew I would need to buy two tickets for him and I was looking on the airline's website to try to find out what their policy was on how to purchase the two tickets and you can get two tickets in the same name and all of that and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried overweight and obese and two tickets for one person -- I tried all the search things I could think of, and finally found it under persons of size. I thought that was such a lovely way to put it that I decided to use animals of size here. So preparing before a disaster of course is even more crucial if you have large animals like horses or cattle or sheep or goats or pigs that are on your property. Make sure that all of the animals have identification and evacuate them if at all possible. Be sure you have enough vehicles and trailers, handlers and drivers. Make sure there is food, water, shelter and care available and waiting for you at your destination because if you evacuate with a lot of large animals, you will want to know that they will have a place to go when you get to where you're going. And if evacuation is impossible, then you will have to decide whether to try to move the animals to shelter or to just turn them outside. For service animals, if you evacuate, be sure to take your service animal's medication and medical records along with a sturdy harness and a carrier that is large enough for the animal to stand, turn and lie down. Take enough pet food and water with you to last three days. And taking some of your service animals' familiar items may help to reduce stress for the animal because people feel stress, but so do animals. You have to decide whether to shelter here or there. If you take refuge in a shelter or if you even just decide to shelter in place at home, you need to plan ahead. Following an actual disaster, you might not be able to get any help for several days. You need to have your own food, our own freshwater and other supplies to last at least three days. And it's likely that you will be without one or more of your basic services like electricity, gas, water or phone for several days or even several weeks. So try to plan as much as possible for that. If you have difficulty with understanding or communicating with other people, and if you're in a shelter with shelter staff, then you might want to prepare written cards in advance that explain your disability and explain the kind of help that you are likely to need in order to understand and/or communicate with the staff. And here I'm not just talking about if you need sign language interpretation, for example, or that sort of thing, although that's definitely one area; but even if you have a cognitive impairment that makes communication difficult or a speech impairment that makes communication difficult and sometimes worse when you're stressed, these are the kinds of things that you might want to prepare a card for so that you can hand it to the shelter staff and it will help explain. Because although the people who are coming to a shelter are obviously very stressed, the shelter workers are also under a great deal of stress and they may not take the time with people that they should, but having a card, something quick for them to read that explains your difficulty can be very much appreciated by staff and will help with services. I want to talk a little bit about businesses. Normally I divide this up into giving this talk to businesses or giving it to individuals with disabilities or giving it to representatives of state and local governments. So in this one I've sort of covered it all, but it means that I'm chopping it up a little. Of course in Texas we don't say business, we say bidness, so that's why that's at the top like that. If you have a business, there is no requirement that you have an emergency evacuation plan unless, of course, you have obligations under OSHA or under state and local law, but certainly there is no federal requirements that businesses have an emergency evacuation plan. But if you do have a plan, then it has to include individuals with disabilities. Inclusive planning is so important. When an emergency plan is being developed, include employees with disabilities in the planning. Do not assume that everyone with a disability will need evacuation assistance. For example, a person with a visual impairment might prefer to walk downstairs with their service animal unassisted or even without their service animal, but walk downstairs unassisted and they don't need someone trying to drag them in a helpful way. They won't need assistance with evacuation, but people with disabilities are in the best position to be able to assess their needs. And it's always to -- it's all right to do an annual survey. One way in a large company to find out what people might need is to do a periodic survey of all employees to ask who might need assistance in an evacuation. You don't have to ask people what their disability is or those kind of probing questions, but just ask if they might need assistance in an evacuation, and there may be people without disabilities who will need assistance in some way and there will certainly be people with disabilities who do not need assistance. My favorite example of this is the business -- the employer that said that they had a plan for the person in their office who worked -- who used a wheelchair for mobility. And their plan was that they had a big refrigerator box and they would put the person and the wheelchair in the refrigerator box and push them down the stairs that way. And then for the really good example of somebody's heart beet beating in the right place, but not including the person with disability in the planning. That person may have told them to shred the refrigerator box or worse. Is. So a few ideas to help businesses get started and some of these really for individuals as well, but things to talk to employers about or if you're an employer, to talk to your employees about. Emergency alarms and signs should -- that show emergency exit routes, and those should be accessible and in working order. And both of those things are sometimes overlooked. So the signs should be -- should obviously be in other formats, raised letter or Braille and there should be emergency alarms that are visual as well as audible. Designate areas of rescue assistance and I've indicated in the PowerPoint the section of the ADAAG, the Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility guidelines where you can find out more information about that. Purchase evacuation devices and train employees on them. It's great to have an evacuation device, but useless unless other employees know how to use it. And of course remove physical barriers to evacuation routes. A lot of times there are barriers to the routes that people don't think about because they are not -- the evacuation routes aren't used very often. So sometimes since they are space that is not oven used, they become storage areas and then he are not accessible because there are barriers in place. People may spend a lot of money on buying evacuation chairs, for example, and then put things in front of the chairs so that -- I mean the storage area for the evacuation chair so that you can't get to the chair. So it's just important to keep thinking about those things even after they are established. For people who use wheelchairs, employers might want to provide heavy gloves to protect the hands from debris and a patch kit to repair flat tires, especially if evacuation is likely to have to take place over actual ground as opposed to concrete where it might be level and less debris but you don't know because depending on the type of emergency that exist, there may still be a lot of debris even in a clean parking lot. So install lighted fire strobes or other visual or alerting devices to go along with audible alarms and there is more information about that in the ADAAG as well. Install tactile signs and maps for every employee who has visual impairments, and think about ways to communicate with employees who have cognitive impairments as well. They might be comfortable with color coding of escape doors or maybe information that is on cassette tape that they can listen to. Employees with respiratory impairments might have difficulties with smoke, dust, fumes, chemicals. Consider if those employees are in your business to have respiration hoods or masks for your employees. These are just a few ideas to get you started thinking about disabilities when making emergency plans. There is so much information on emergency planning for individuals, for businesses, for agencies, for governmental entities and on the last several slides of the PowerPoint, those websites are listed. So even if you're not looking at the PowerPoint now, check back to get that if you're interested in getting these links because there are a lot. I have a whole lot of links there that you can go to that will provide more information for you. And of course you can contact us as any time at the end of the PowerPoint is my personal contact information in terms of E-mail address and then it's got the 1-800 number for DBTACs and wherever you are in the country, when you call that number, it will be routed to the ADA center that's nearest to you and your questions can be answered there as well. So Laurel, are you still awake? >> LAUREL: Listen, I am planning my -- trying to figure out what's a safe place for me to put my stuff. I'm into this. >> JACQUIE: All right, do we have any questions? >> LAUREL: Dawn, have we received any questions? >> DAWN: We just got one, but it looks like several -- if it's all right I may just print it out and take it down to the presenter because it looks like it's pretty long. >> JACQUIE: Okay. >> DAWN: Right now that's the one we've got. >> JACQUIE: Bring it on down. >> DAWN: It will be there in a minute. >> LAUREL: Jacquie, I was wondering about safe location for important papers. What are you recommending or people who have been through these catastrophes, are you talking about a large baggie that contains all this stuff or one of those safes that is both waterproof and fire proof or just in a folder that you know where to get? >> JACQUIE: Yeah. Well, the baggie was really good when you're talking about flooding and the hurricane and things. That turned out to be a really good choice for people because it kept the water out which was good. A lot of people use those sort of fire proof little boxes that are the size of shoe boxes that you can get most anywhere that will offer some protection in a fire and you can keep all of them there as long as they can kept somewhere -- as long as it's not in the very back of a closet or something where you can never get to it in an emergency, but there are lots of different ways from -- really I guess those are the sort of two ends or I guess people actually use safes and safety deposit boxes would not be a good choice because if it's in a bank and your city goes under water, the safety deposit box may well be safe, but you may not be able to get to it for a really long time. >> LAUREL: Like New Orleans. >> JACQUIE: And if you need those papers to get even the beginnings of assistance, then it's going to be really bad. The question that she just brought down to me is not really a question. It's some more information resources kinds of things. So I'm just going to read this because it's some more really good resources. The community emergency preparedness information network -- CEPIN -- this is an effort that's headed by Telecommunications for the Deaf, Incorporated, to develop a curriculum for emergency personnel and first responders to better train people for working with people who are deaf or hard of hearing before, during and after emergencies. A wealth of information is available at cepintdi.org. Also we at WGBH have a project funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce to research and develop best practices for communicating with people who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, visually impaired or Deaf-blind. We're developing ideal message content as well as researching usability of communication devices such as pagers, websites, T. V. broadcasts, datacasting and pda's. We're working with a national consumer advisory board as well as a group of first responder representatives. And more info on that can be found at ncam.wbgh.org/alert. >> LAUREL: Good information. We'll post that on the web page so that people with -- so they can follow up with that. But good information. Of course Jacquie has this list of websites that are very good. I was curious about best of show -- talking about June. What is best of show? June Kailes disaster resources? >> JACQUIE: Best of show my designation as the best website out there on disaster because June has pulled together everything. You know, she's pulled it from a lot of other websites. So it's not just her own articles which are stellar, but also information from the other websites that I've mentioned. She's got a link to the Time article. She's got from FEMA and even these other websites I just mentioned, she's got information from everywhere drawn together. So you can spend days going through the links on her website. So I recommend that one highly. >> LAUREL: She's aces anyway, I want to go back to the thing you said about if people have data on their computers that they should download to a disk or portable device which nowadays you can get those little bitty things that look like Chiclets. Would it be good to have copies of papers on a disk? Are those acceptable? >> JACQUIE: Yeah, scanned copies are preferable to just say a copy of the document before it was signed and certified and all that. So scanned copies are really great to have and will almost always be acceptable for -- in the aftermath of a disaster where things have been lost. So that's generally not a problem at all. >> LAUREL: So with them getting -- I got one the other day that costs about $14. Of course I can't make it work, but it's cheap. >> JACQUIE: You know, they really are -- I know during the Christmas season there have been a lot of free -- those free Flash drives if you buy something you get one free. So they really are coming way down in price and you can get definitely a 1 gig for ten bucks now. So be watching the sales. They're not prohibitively expensive and they're so easy the take everywhere. >> LAUREL: I wanted to ask about when you do these presentations, you were talking about doing them for employers. What's the reception by the people? >> JACQUIE: It's always really good I have to say because they invited me to come. So it's not -- you know, the only negative thing I guess I've ever encountered is a certain defensiveness with we already do this kind of thing, but if they -- if they invite you to come talk to their business, then the reception is good and they have obviously decided this is something that they need and it's just -- it's really incredible how this has really exploded in terms of the -- just in terms of how much there is available for it and how much the need now is better perceived than it was even a year ago. I mean, people are really kind of getting into disaster preparedness and what you need to do. >> LAUREL: Really? That's excellent. I assume the municipalities are -- when they hear a presentation like this, and of course here in Houston we receive so many people -- like not half a million, but it was quite a few people. >> JACQUIE: We still have over 100,000 evacuees living here. >> LAUREL: Here in Houston? And from what I hear, few plan to return; but do you know whether or not -- I guess it takes a certain amount of time especially for government -- even if it's our local government -- to implement these kinds of disaster planning policies. >> JACQUIE: Sure. Especially for large municipalities which, you know, in the case of Houston all that stuff takes time, although in the emergency we definitely -- this city really did step up and did what needed to be done and only later then figured out a policy to go with it. You know, this city is as big a some states and there is a lot that goes into the planning, but the state has done rather well although it hasn't been put to the test, but shortly after -- a month after Katrina, hurricane Rita was headed our direction and caused terrible traffic problems where the trip to Dallas where most people evacuated to is normally a three and a half hour drive and it was a 30 hour drive for some people and the planning was really not great; but they've really taken a lot of steps in this last year to correct that and they hope that it is correct. >> LAUREL: Yes, hope they never have to use it and that it's correct. When we were responding to people who were in the disasters in the Houston area -- I mean who called us, and they weren't just in Houston? >> JACQUIE: No, all over the country. Because what happened was FEMA started giving out our 800-number and what happens with the 800-number is whatever area code you call from, it routes your call to the DBTAC that's in your area. There are ten DBTACs each covering five states. >> LAUREL: So if I was in Nebraska and I called the 800 number I would get the one for that area. >> JACQUIE: Right. But the problem was when people evacuated, they took their cell phones, and if they called on their 504 cell phone which is the New Orleans number, their call got routed to us any way. And more people came to Texas than any other state or if they stayed in Louisiana somewhere, went to another part of Louisiana or Oklahoma or Arkansas or New Mexico, then those calls got routed to us even if they called from a land line in those states that we would get those calls. So literally, we got hundreds of calls a day at first and then it tapered off, but we're still -- we still get calls every day and even though we're now a year and some months past the event. >> LAUREL: It seemed like when we were going through it, it was more than hundreds. It seemed like thousands. >> JACQUIE: Not daily. I think at the height it was five or six hundred a day. >> LAUREL: For a couple of months I guess. It seemed to me that when we were doing that, that we got calls from just an awful lot of older people, especially older women, but then quite a few with children and so on. The major problem tended to be around registering with FEMA and having a cash flow problem, but I can't -- were there any -- did anything come out of there that you might want to recommend to people when they -- if they are in a disaster and want to register with FEMA, just what to keep in mind? >> JACQUIE: Really, I put most of that in there because the people who had the hardest time getting those emergency funds were people who couldn't prove who they were and couldn't prove that they were residents of New Orleans. We even had a lot of people who just, you know, a person has an extra bedroom so they let them live there. They never had a lease agreement or anything and they couldn't -- because they couldn't prove their residency and they weren't a property owner, they were unable to get even the emergency funds that they needed. But FEMA learned a lot during that, too, and we hope that -- we hope that they learned those lessons and will make changes next time. >> LAUREL: But we'll be prepared just in case I think. >> JACQUIE: Right. Right. >> LAUREL: With that. I think we've probably covered the subject just as thoroughly as we could. This has been -- well, you know, those of us here in Houston and the gulf coast areas, we're at tuned and this is always important to us because of a lifetime of experience in the area, but you know, we just all can remember that dread full earthquake during the world series a few years ago, not to mention fires and -- fires in homes as well as that terrible wildfire that took over the country. There are just so many things that can happen. And this preparedness stuff is just -- it's a good reminder and it's a good prompting. >> JACQUIE: I spoke in New Mexico a month or so ago at the southwest conference on disabilities and their big thing there was, as you mentioned, fires. They've had some really difficulties with fires and they are very spread out, especially throws living in the mountains and there were just different things to think about and brain storm about. I got a couple more things from Dawn here. One is someone in Tennessee sent us just a warning that says, one point about carrying information on a Flash drive or something like that is the risk of losing it to or having it stolen by thieves and I guess that's always a problem even if you're just carrying papers, you know, or having your purse stolen. That's always going to be a risk. >> LAUREL: Good advice. Good things to keep in mind. >> JACQUIE: And then the other thing is someone who just wanted to share with us what they have been doing in Connecticut. They have developed many resources including a guide for including people with disabilities in disaster preparedness planning. They've been doing trainings with first responders on working with people with disabilities. >> LAUREL: Excellent. >> JACQUIE: And so they just wanted to let us know about that and their website is uconucdd.org. >> LAUREL: And we'll post that as well with the comments. And one that you don't have on your list but I want to make sure that we let our folks know, the folks at the Research and Training Center on independent living in Lawrence -- at the university of Kansas has a CDC grant on disaster preparedness and all their material is worth looking at, both the stuff on the independent living area as well as on this. Glen White heads that up and they do just a marvelous job in everything they undertake. Then I think we've covered it. In closing, before I get to give the closing and credits -- >> JACQUIE: No, you go ahead and do the closing and credits. You guys -- everybody knows they can call or E-mail and we'll be happy to help you out. >> LAUREL: Absolutely. And come back to this page and we'll have more -- we'll have the additional information on resources posted and as Jacquie says if questions occur to you, don't hesitate to call or E-mail. We'll post those if it's not too intimate. If it's real intimate, we'll post knit a more interesting place. These webcast are like anything that's live, it's -- we never quite know what's going to happen and we're sure pleased that you were able to stay with us. We've had times when we've been knocked off the air or other very odd circumstances occurred. And therefore, we keep these webcasts on kind of a casual level -- not to say that we're not earnest about what we do, but it's casual and friendly. The fact that we're sitting at our desks and not seeing any of the human beings who may be listening. It lends to a friendlier, more casual atmosphere and so we look forward to hearing how we did with this. There is an evaluation form you can click on. We would be delighted to get any kind of feedback. Moreover, if topics occur to you that you'd like to hear about on any subject, these subjects, ADA subjects or independent living subjects, please let us know that kind of information is extremely valuable. And moreover, issues pertaining to navigability of a website is crucial to us. Anything about that we'd like to know about. But just in closing now I want to thank the people who help us with this webcast -- the technical end of it. And we just -- you know, we just can't do it without it. It's a difficult, complex method of disseminating information because there is so many parts, but because we have a good team, it goes -- it goes very smoothly. So the studio technicians -- the real show Biz guy, Rob Dickehuth is with Baylor College of Medicine. And our captioner is Marie Bryant. Our webcast team at ILRU is Marj Gordon and Sharon Finney, Dawn Heinsohn and we're so grateful to them for the job they do. And meanwhile, again, to acknowledge the support of the Research and Training Center -- Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on health and wellness at the University of Oregon -- it's University of health and sciences university -- Oregon Health Sciences University. Now, they also have an excellent website with good information on health, wellness and research programs and don't hesitate to visit there. And then NIDRR for providing the impetus for these presentations. Meanwhile, those of us here at ILRU will say good afternoon and please join us next time when June Kailes covers issues related to having a disability and trying to get medical tests taken care of. She's going to cover what's known as medical instrumentation, but it has to do with equipment and instruments that doctors or physicians and other health care providers use, how are they accessible to people with disabilities, what are they going to do so we get excellent health care just like the folks who are able bodied. So please join us for that. Meanwhile, Jacquie, good afternoon to you all and to our colleagues out there in the Internet area. Good afternoon. >> JACQUIE: Thanks a lot, Laurel. Bye-bye.