Los Angeles weighs a register of disasters. Disability defenders warn against false insurance.

Following the fatty forest fires in January, the leaders of the County of Los Angeles weigh a register of disasters intended to help disabled and senior residents to connect to emergency stakeholders to put them in safety during disasters.

Comté supervisors approved a feasibility study this spring for such a voluntary database. The supporters have applauded the effort to give more notice and assistance to the more than a million residents of the county with a certain type of disability, such as cognitive disorders or limited mobility.

“If we know that people perish in these situations, what are our answers?” said Hilary Norton, who directs Fastlinkdtla, a non -profit organization focused on mobility problems. “This is the moment when people really understand the magnitude of people in need when things like this happen.”

In the midst of the growing frequency of natural disasters across the United States – was strongly supported by recent fatal floods in Texas – the governments of Oregon’s states and premises in North Carolina have turned to disaster registers to prioritize aid to vulnerable residents when fires, hurricanes and other environmental catastrophes are launched. But while some politicians say that these registers are a potential solution to a public health problem, many disability defenders consider them ineffective tools that give people a false feeling of security because there is no guarantee of aid to evacuation.

“They are described in a way that communicates that if you place your information in this register and that you will need help, they will be able to plan it, so in a disaster, you will be more safe. And in reality, this is simply not the case,” said Maria Town, president and chief executive officer of the American Association of People with disability.

Town, which has reached brain paralysis, has been in Houston for six months when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. The Texas puts a free register called the Texas State Aid Register available to cities and counties to help them identify the needs in their communities, but how or if they use it belongs to them. According to a study by the National Council on Disability, minus 5% of people who have registered were contacted during Harvey, and even less have obtained evacuation assistance, according to a study by the National Council on the Disability. The hurricane took 89 lives.

“I heard people say,” I thought I was safe. I signed up, “said Town about the calls she made during and after Harvey.

Neither the Division of Texas of Emergency Management nor those responsible for the county of Kerr, the region have reached the latest by the recent floods of Texas Hill Country, answered questions on the conduct of accommodation for residents of the register at the start of the disaster in early July.

Many registers, such as the Florida special needs register, expressly say to the participants that they must always make their own evacuation plans. The Florida Department of Health oversees the register and, as in Texas, shares information with managers of local emergencies for their use. In the county of Rockingham in North Carolina, individuals must apply to be on the register and inclusion is not guaranteed. The Jackson counties and Josephine de l’Oregon counties warns that he can take up to three months for residents to be made available to rescuers.

The National Disability Council claims that the registers are harmful. “They are ineffective and provide a false feeling of security for future guaranteed assistance,” said Nicholas Sabula, spokesperson for the organization, in a statement.

The California Governor’s Emergency Services Office “also discourages” by using the registers, saying that they can dissuade people from making their own disaster plans and raising confidentiality problems. Disability defenders also cited privacy as a concern.

But Los Angeles politicians behind the register effort insist that they are worth examining – at least a third of those who died in Eaton’s fire had problems that could affect their mobility and therefore their ability to flee from a disaster, according to an analysis of the Los Angeles Times. Anthony Mitchell Sr., amputated in a wheelchair, and his 35 -year -old son, Justin, who had a cerebral paralysis, was one of the 18 people killed when the forest fire torn the community of the County of Los Angeles of Altadena in January.

The aging of the County population of Los Angeles: the California Department of Finance’s Demographic Research Unit has the aging of the Population of the County of the: more than a quarter of the residents of the County of Los Angeles will be 60 or over by 2030 – around 2.5 million people.

The Kathryn Barger supervisor, who represents Altadena and proposed the study of the register with the supervisor Janice Hahn, “wants to explore and explore her usefulness”, according to her communications director, Helen Chavez Garcia. According to Chavez Garcia, Barger had not yet spoken to the community of the first community of responders or had conversations on how the emergency services would use the register.

Victoria Jump, assistant director of the Department of Aging and Disabilities of the Comté, conducts the feasibility study – which, according to her, does not include cost estimates – and will do a recommendation to the supervisory board this month on the advisability of supporting the project. The council will decide to move forward. Jump said she had received largely positive comments in more than a dozen community sessions.

This is not the first time that Los Angeles has envisaged and even implemented a disaster register. The county maintained a voluntary disaster register called specific planning of awareness -raising needs, but recognized in 2016 that the program “does not guarantee the priority service to those who are registered” and had a “low return on investment”. He was interrupted and the registrants were migrated to a mass emergency alert system called alert the county.

“We have already experienced this with the county. It did not work. It did not work across the country,” said June Kailes, a resident of Los Angeles, a disability defender who uses a power scooter.

Kailes considers what happened in Eaton’s fire as an emergency planning problem, saying that the county must better understand how to provide people with disabilities. She underlined Galen Buckwalter, a paralyzed survivor of the Eaton fire who would have led his motorized wheelchair to a mile in the dark to evacuate when he realized that it would be impossible for a carpooling service to recover it largely of the conditions.