[rising music, slow guitar strumming]
Adrien: No disasters are natural.
When you know in advance who is likely
to be the most harmed by a disaster and
you don't do anything about it, then that is a choice.
It's about whose lives are more valuable
and which ones aren't as valuable.
Jeanne: People with disabilities
did definitely get stuck here,
many people died...
which was horrendous and should never happen.
Rickii: No one knew what to do for the city in general,
let alone a population of people
who are normally overlooked.
Katrina Survivor: They?re not doing nothing.
They're not telling us nothing, they?re not doing nothing.
We've been out here?
look at all these old people...
they out here without their medication...
they're in wheelchairs, we need help, sir
we really need help!
Adrien: It is foreseeable that people with disabilities
are going to have a harder time evacuating, they're
going to have a harder time receiving information
about the disaster.
That's essentially a choice, saying that we as a society
are okay with people with disabilities
not surviving, or suffering much more so than people
without disabilities in the event of a disaster.
Rickii: I don't want to be overlooked in that way.
we're already overlooked in so many other things
but for emergencies, everybody should be
included in the plan properly.
Jeanne: People have a right to be rescued,
so that they don't perish
just because they have a disability.
[slow piano music]
Jeanne: My name is Jeanne Abadie
and I work for The Advocacy Center,
which is the Protection and Advocacy (P&A)
organization in Louisiana.
In 2005,
New Orleans had nothing special for anybody
to be rescued, it was just: Get out of town!
So, of course, many people could not get out of town
either because of disability, they had
a family member with a disability
or they had no money.
More affordable, medium income, to low income areas
of the city were hit the hardest.
People in poverty have a harder time
getting out, and there just so happens that
there's a large percentage of people with disabilities
that live in poverty.
Rickii: You have to think about every single
aspect of life.
I think a little bit more than most people who can jump
in their car and pack their kids up and just
drive off. You can't do that.
You have to see who's going to take you,
where you're gonna go, how you're gonna get there.
Someone may just have a physical disability like
myself, but then you may have someone who is
ill with cancer, and you may have someone with asthma,
like, you have to think all those types of things
Earl: My name is Earl Robicheaux,
I live in Berwick, Lousiana.
I was diagnosed with Burkitt's lymphoma
in July of 2005,
and eventually placed in Charity Hospital
in New Orleans, and then Katrina hit
August 29th.
I was placed in a special isolation room
and that was to prevent infection.
The air condition is very low, usually they keep
it around 50, 55 to reduce bacterial counts.
Hopefully the antibiotics will work.
If they don't work, you'll just die.
It was when the levees broke
and the water came that the problems
really started occurring.
The generators were in the basement,
so they got flooded
and of course we had no power
as a result.
So I went from a room that was like 55 degrees,
to a room that was like 115 [degrees]
within say, three hours.
The only way I could think of surviving the whole thing
was to strip down to my underwear and just lay
in the bed very still.
I was on a gravity drip IV,
and I just laid there for five days
and watched helicopters fly around the building.
So, we were the last,
probably the last hospital to be evacuated on day five.
First responders were great...
it's just that they came there five days later.
I feel lucky,
I knew it was kinda bad...
but I didn?t know it was really
really that desperate, you know,
for so many people.
Rickii: When we left and we saw the devastation
that was going on... there's no way
I know I wouldn?t have been able to survive that.
I lived in New Orleans East, I stayed
on the second floor my apartment.
No one would have been able to come to rescue me
because the water had hit so fast
that,
it was,
people who were back there were just stuck.
Jeanne: I have a good friend who died,
who was on a, who uses a wheelchair and,
and was on an overpass for days,
She didn't die there,
but she ended up with complications.
She probably died about six months later.
It was horrible for many,
for people with disabilities, the impact is greater.
My name is Pam Minning,
and I used to live in New Orleans.
I met Benny when I was about nineteen, 20 years old,
the first day that we met was
actually in an Italian class and
a very sweet voice, she said:
?Hi, my name's Benilda, but my friends call me Benny.?
and after that she was
always Benny, and she was always my friend.
She enjoyed life, you know...
she loved chocolates and coffee
and smoking her cigarettes. [laughs]
Benny had a rare form of muscular dystrophy,
she used an electric wheelchair.
She had no use of her two lower legs,
there was no strength in them.
One of her arms, she had partial use out of
and the other arm she had pretty good strength in.
But then as the years progressed, she was losing
some of the strength.
She could cook.
She always lived of course on the first floor apartment,
she had a shower that she could go into.
So joy of life and independence were the two
most important things for her personally.
She wanted other people with disabilities to have
comfortable lives to
make sure that they were protected,
that people didn't take advantage of them.
She volunteered with a bunch of
disability rights organizations.
Anything that she could do
to get involved, and give back.
She had decided that she was going to evacuate.
She had called a company that was supposed to come
and get her, and she said that they were going
to take her to the Hyatt.
I did not get a phone call from her that day
and at first I thought maybe
she got busy, who knows why, but I thought
well I'm gonna try and call her.
I said, ?Benny,
What are you doing still there?!?
She said, ?Pam, they've abandoned me? she said, ?Yes,
I spoke to the driver,?
and I said, ?what, why didn't he come and pick you up??
She said, ?he told me ?I can't come and get you,
I've got my own family to worry about.? ?
and he hung up on her.
The police told Benny that they would take her to
the Superdome.
They did not want to take her wheelchair
or her physical assistant.
She physically could not have
gotten by without the help of someone
and without her wheelchair, she couldn't
she couldn?t have made it.
Storm passed everything seemed okay...
I called, and she let out a huge sigh of relief,
and we started talking and just kind of relaxing...
then all of the sudden, she said
that she heard something, she goes,
?Wait, I hear something.?
and she goes, ?Oh my God,
water's coming in.?
and I could just hear this panic in her voice,
and then all of the sudden the phone line cut out.
[tense piano music]
I tried calling on her cell phone,
I tried all during the day
and I could not get through.
Her physical assistant called here and
said when she last left her,
she was in water up to her neck
and that Benny handed her
her cell phone and her address book
and said, ?Call Pam, call the others
and tell them I'm dead. There's no reason for
two of us to drown.?
Now it's sadness, but
for about three years it was anger.
It shouldn't happen.
Adrien: My name is Adrien Weibgen, I'm
a staff attorney of the Urban Justice Center
Community Development Project in New York,
and I'm also the author of the article
"The Right To Be Rescued:
Disability Justice in an Age of Disaster"
"The Right To Be Rescued" refers to the idea that
people with disabilities have a right, equal to that
of people without disabilities to receive
emergency services
In California, disability rights advocates brought
a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles
alleging that the City's plans violated the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and
the Rehabilitation Act (RA),
and the parties negotiated a settlement to
improve emergency plans in those areas and make
them more responsive to the needs of
people with disabilities.
In New York, disability rights advocates brought
another lawsuit which again alleged that the City's
emergency plans violated a ADA and RA,
and the court enumerated very specific ways in which
the City would have to revise its plans in order to
be compliant with the ADA and RA.
Unfortunately, I do expect more cities and states
to be sued, and I say it in that manner because
they could avoid being sued
if they revise their plans sooner,
And I think that is going to happen in some places,
and its already started to happen in some places
I think that that's a positive sign, I don't
I don't think people should wait to be sued
Rickii: Emergency planners have to think about space,
like, where they're going to put people,
how they're actually going to organize people
according to their needs.
Jeanne: Assistive devices, communication devices
are of course, extremely important to people
who depend on those day to day.
Rickii: You have to think about
food, what if someone needs help
administering their own medication, you know, how
how do you do that? How do you know the
proper dosages of that stuff?
Jeanne: To make sure that the shelters
are accessible if
somebody has to go to a shelter,
to make sure that to get to the shelter
that the transportation is accessible.
Rickii: It's a lot. [laughs]
it's really a lot that you have to think of.
You need to reach out to the disability community.
Nobody can tell you what they need better than
getting it straight from the horse's mouth,
you know, there needs to be communication.
Pam: You look back, and you wish
you wish, you wish...
we can't do anything about the past
other than learn from it, and
shame on us if we don't move forward.
Charlotte: My name is Charlotte Parent.
I am Director of Health for the City of New Orleans.
What's been developed for us now
is a coalition of people who work with people with
disabilities, our seniors which is a large portion
of our population,
to discuss year-long:
What are the plans?
What are you doing? How can we help you?
So when the emergency does happen,
we're already at that point of being prepared for it.
The original Special Needs Registry began
right after Katrina.
They call in with the information,
we do a one-page sheet to get some
basic demographic information:
Where do they live?
Beyond the wheelchair, is there
anything else that you have?
When the evacuation would happen at that point,
we would then look to say ?okay, we got this person,
they live in this particular neighborhood
They're in a wheelchair, so they're gonna need
a lift bus to pick them up,?
and then we dispatch from there and get
the right persons into the right places,
once the evacuation is started.
We feel really good about what we're doing,
and we're doing the right thing to prepare
our community.
[rising music, slow guitar strumming]
Rickii: Everybody definitely has a right to be rescued.
Everybody on this Earth
deserves to be taken care of,
and to be thought of as a human being.
You know, people with disabilities, elderly people,
whomever, you know, we all need help in some way,
shape or form.
People with disabilities have a couple extra things but
I mean we still need to be rescued,
we need to be thought of.
Adrien: Every city is going to have
some kind of evacuation plan and
it's going to need to think about how to
make that a plan that works for everyone.
Jeanne: The worst case scenario
if we don't prepare, is people die unnecessarily.