Disability amid disaster: People with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by natural disasters
After disasters, people with disabilities are more likely to be displaced, more likely to never return home and more likely to receive scam offers, Census Bureau data shows.
Feb. 23, 2025, 6:00 AM CST / Updated Feb. 23, 2025, 2:10 PM CST
By Ash Reynolds
As Reda Rountree and her family packed their bags and prepared to flee their Highland Park home on Jan. 7 amid Eaton Fire evacuations, she realized in horror that her wheelchair would not fit in their SUV with all of the luggage.
“I cried,” said Rountree, who has used the chair since 2023 because of long Covid and POTS. “I stood by the car realizing: ‘OK, wait. I’m not going to have a way to be mobile. What am I going to do?’”
“If I didn’t have my kids and my husband to help me get out of the house, I don’t know what would have happened to me,” she added. “Especially knowing what has happened to other disabled people in L.A., it’s scary.”
At least eight of the more than 20 known fatalities from the January fires were elderly or disabled, the latest example of how these groups are especially vulnerable during natural disasters.
Disabled people are almost twice as likely to be displaced by natural disasters, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. For some groups, like those who require nonverbal communication methods, the likelihood of displacement can be even higher.
The data also shows that once displaced, 21% of people with disabilities say they never return home, nearly four times the rate for those without disabilities.
Experts say people with disabilities are often left behind during evacuation and recovery efforts, and that as climate change amplifies the frequency and scale of natural disasters, the discrepancies are becoming more serious.
Los Angeles County’s Aging & Disabilities Department runs senior centers and transportation services, and works to ensure the safety of older adults and people with disabilities. Department Director Laura Trejo said the fires placed a strain on all of those services.
“In 40 years of this work, I had never experienced this,” Trejo said. “The number of skilled nursing and assisted living facilities having to be evacuated; that was a very unique feature of these fires.”
Rountree, who chronicled her evacuation in a Substack newsletter, has been unable to return home since fleeing. She has tried to return multiple times, but Covid has left her vulnerable to smoke and air pollutants, so she could only stay a few hours each time.
“Suddenly I couldn’t breathe,” Rountree said. “It felt like I was in the middle of a fire. I really thought I was going to pass out.”
Experts say the largest obstacle people with disabilities face when attempting to return to disaster-struck regions is a lack of affordable homes built to accommodate disabilities.
“It’s really hard to find accessible housing in the first place,” said Jordan Davis, an attorney for Disability Rights California. “So when it’s destroyed or damaged, it’s typically not rebuilt, at least with the same enthusiasm as other housing.”
Without housing, experts say, many people with disabilities are instead placed in congregate care institutions such as nursing homes, often against their will and for long periods of time.
Michael Stein, co-founder and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, said that after a crisis there’s a temptation “to try to at least get people into what seems to be a safe space, and then to try to sort out how to improve their life afterwards.”
“But that second part of the equation very often falls by the wayside,” Stein said.
In the aftermath of hurricanes Helene and Milton last year, the National Council on Disability wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security urging an end to the practice of institutionalizing people with disabilities after disasters.
Scams are another issue that disproportionately affects the disabled community after a disaster. Census data shows they receive scam offers at more than twice the rate of the general population.
Scammers may go around impacted neighborhoods posing as government officials or private contractors requesting upfront payments for home repairs that never come to fruition.
“They go and prey on the most vulnerable people,” said Curtis Hill, the supervising advocate for outreach and disaster response for Disability Rights North Carolina, who has seen three hurricanes hit eastern North Carolina in the past eight years.
Trejo, from Los Angeles County, expects scams to continue after the fires.
“In previous situations, we have seen that especially older adults and adults with disabilities could be targeted,” Trejo said. “We’re already working to start doing community education and outreach. We’ve been on that already for over a week, because there was so much loss of home.”
Experts say the neglect of people with disabilities during natural disasters is in large part due to their exclusion from the planning process.
“Policymakers and government people should be interacting with individuals with disabilities and their representative organizations,” Stein said. “They know their lives better than anyone else does.”
In January, L.A. County officials proposed keeping a database of addresses with residents who might have trouble evacuating, an idea that some are skeptical about.
“What sounds like a great and simple concept on paper … in actuality is super complex and been met with resounding ‘no’ from all sides,” Robert Burress, program manager for emergency management and disaster services in South Carolina, told NBC News via email. “Especially from the vulnerable communities.”
Some members of the disabled community have been working to support each other during disasters for years. The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, a disability-led nonprofit, maintains a hotline for people with disabilities to request help in a disaster.
Experts encourage everybody, disabled or otherwise, to have a personal preparedness plan in the event of a disaster.
“The best advice I can give to anyone disabled or not is first, know your neighbor,” Burress said. “More times than not, your neighbors are the ones going through the same disaster right beside you. Those are the people that will check on you fastest and know when you need help.”
CORRECTION (Feb. 23, 2025, 3:10 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the neighborhood where Reda Rountree lives. It is Highland Park, not Altadena.