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Elderly
Often Overlooked In City Emergency Plans By Kelly Greene, The Wall Street Journal April 13, 2003 A New York nonprofit is urging communities across the U.S. to make emergency-preparedness plans for older people -- particularly those who could be stranded in an evacuation. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Nora O'Brien, director of partnerships at the International Longevity Center in New York, was struck by the contrast between rescue efforts for pets and those for the elderly. Animal advocates were on the scene within 24 hours, but some older and disabled people waited as long as a week for an ad-hoc medical team to come get them, she says. In fact, at least some of the home health aides, meals-on-wheels deliverers and other workers who tried to reach people living close to Ground Zero were turned away because they lacked official identification. In an attempt to figure out where the breakdown occurred, she and co-workers spent several months interviewing emergency organizations, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, American Red Cross, local police, firefighters and citywide groups that assist older and disabled people. Her findings are disturbing: New York, along with many other cities, lacks a comprehensive system to locate older and disabled people, "appropriate" emergency management to help them and an effective way to get information to them before and after emergencies, she writes in a recent report, "Emergency Preparedness for Older People." (You can read it online.) Next, the International Longevity Center came up with ideas for a citywide disaster plan, which Ms. O'Brien says she hopes can "be used in cities around the country for any type of emergency." She spread the word at a recent conference of 3,700 advocates for the aging in Chicago and is fielding e-mail requests for advice from all over. "We're being flooded," she says. Among the report's recommendations for local communities: Create a citywide emergency plan for older and disabled people that can coordinate supply and demand for volunteers. In New York after the 9/11 attacks, the best-known programs that help older people were swamped with so many volunteers that some got turned away -- while lesser-known nonprofits went without. Use census reports to create a map identifying neighborhoods with high concentrations of older people, in an attempt to avoid abandoning older, disabled people in buildings that are evacuated. Find a way to provide medications on an emergency basis, since pharmacies may remain closed during an emergency. On New York's East Side, a group of community agencies and foundations that work with older people has been meeting since late 2001 in an attempt to figure out how to share resources during future emergencies. They also have compiled a list of their most vulnerable clients, coding them "red," "yellow" or "green," depending on the urgency of their needs. "We looked at home care, food needs, transportation of food to the homebound, and cash needs," says Stephanie Raneri, executive director of the Isaac H. Tuttle Fund, a New York foundation that makes grants to organizations working with the elderly. One of the biggest challenges for such groups is making sure they know about people they don't work with regularly who might need help in an emergency. One tip: Your fire department, or some other local agency that maintains a community database of emergency information, may already use what's known as a "critical information dispatch system," a database that pulls up information on frail or disabled residents. But those databases are updated infrequently at best. So, if you're worried about yourself or a loved one, you may want to call the nonemergency line for your local fire or police department to find out whether there's a place to report such information -- just in case. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
