Disability and Disaster
The Urgency of Disaster Planning
The Caribbean suffered terribly, but Florida escaped the worst of Hurricane Irma. Still, vulnerable people there weren’t safe. Nine nursing home residents in Hollywood Hills, Florida succumbed to the heat when their facility lost power. These extremely vulnerable people with disabilities lost whatever time was left to them, whatever living there might have been. It seems likely that there will be punishment or compensation, but it’s impossible to return what was lost. The most tragic part of the whole situation may be that the dead weren’t killed by the storm through flooding, wind, or the collapse of a building. They didn’t die of the conditions that caused them to need the help that was regrettably unavailable to them outside of an institution. They died, mostly, of slipping through the cracks in the plans of everyone around them. They died because no one could be bothered to prevent it.
Various media outlets reporting on the story have described a cascade of failures. None of the decision-makers involved in this story apparently foresaw the extraordinarily foreseeable. The nursing home, accustomed to operating in a very warm climate, aware of its’ residents frailty, failed to maintain a backup generator sufficient to keep the air conditioning on. Some similar facilities found themselves in the same situation and decided to send their residents somewhere cooler, starting with the most vulnerable people. Even as heat-related medical emergencies mounted, the nursing home failed to move people out.
Someone did eventually call 911, but there may have been a significant delay between the time of the call and the dispatch of first responders. The air conditioning stayed off for so long in part because the nursing home had been given a relatively low priority for having power restored. If one thing on this list of failures had gone right, if the people had been evacuated or the power had come on sooner, the dead would probably be alive. Nine people died for the sole reason that the slipped through the cracks, that no one made plans for them to survive.
Originally published at autisticfuture.com on September 20, 2017.