The Forgotten Victims of September 11: People with Disabilities

Posted on 11 September 2011. Filed under: Advocacy, Disability | Tags: 9/11, Disability, disability rights, disaster, disaster preparedness, emergency, emergency preparedness, evac chair, evacuation, evacuation chair, mobility impairments, people with disabilities, September 11 |

Today is the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed about 3000 people at the World Trade Center in New York, at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and in a field in Pennsylvania, as well as the passengers on the four planes used as weapons of terror. But what most people don’t realize is that a very high portion of the people who died that day were people with disabilities. And this isn’t because they were targeted by terrorists, or because people didn’t bother trying to rescue them. This is because the most typical disaster preparedness plan put in place for people with disabilities usually involves some variant of: Come to location X near the stairs, then sit and wait for rescue. The only problem is, sometimes an emergency moves so fast that there is simply no time for rescue to arrive. And when that happens, people with disabilities are often the first to die because they are the last to be evacuated.

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