Evacuation Chairs Australia

Pictured: Though Nearly an impossible task for people  with disabilities, evacuating buildings quickly during emergencies is a top priority for two research groups at Kansas University. Those heading the research, including Michael Fox center, and Dot Nary, right, hope to make improvements to KU policies and learn from the ways in which 30 Kansas counties dealt with disasters. On Tuesday, the two researchers spoke near a stairwell In the Dole Human Development Center at KU.

If Kansas University’s Dole Human Development Center caught fire, Dot Nary isn’t sure she could make it out quickly and safely.

Nary, who uses a wheelchair, wants to change that.

She is part of a task force of KU staff members who are studying the university’s evacuation procedures for people with disabilities. Members are starting with the Dole Center and Haworth Hall, but they’re hoping to apply their report to all KU buildings.

“It’s like buying insurance,” Nary said. “You hope you don’t have to use it, but you need to attend to it in case.”

The task force is one of two groups at KU studying emergency evacuations for people with disabilities. Researchers recently received a grant to study how escape policies in 30 Kansas counties changed after disaster struck the counties.

The task force studying KU evacuations may recommend additional training for staff members or new equipment. Products such as evacuation chairs " which are portable chairs that can be carried by two people " can aid in removing people with disabilities when elevators aren’t in service.

John Mullens, assistant director of KU’s Public Safety Office, said the university didn’t have many policies regarding evacuations for people with disabilities.

About 20 campus buildings " representing about 40 percent of classroom and office space " have “smart” fire alarms that allow people who can’t escape to press a button in designated “places of refuge” to alert authorities they’re in the building.

“That’s the first thing everybody goes to as far as emergency response,” Mullens said.

He said KU used to train staff members in how to carry people with disabilities. But that could do more harm than good, he said.

“We did that for a while and found out there were problems with people who did it occasionally or only once in their lifetime,” he said. “They got too excited and did it the wrong way.”

Detailing plans

Nary, a doctoral student and training director at KU’s Research and Training Center on Independent Living, works in the Dole Center. She said she hoped the task force would end with recommendations for how KU can train its staff for evacuations.

“I’m not sure they’re as detailed as they need to be,” she said. “There are some real basic issues we need to know how to deal with.”

A team of researchers at KU’s Schiefelbusch Life Span Institute is beginning a study that could bring similar policy changes in other parts of the state.

The researchers received a three-year, $615,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to select 30 Kansas counties that have recently experienced disasters to gather data on whether those disasters changed policies on evacuating people with disabilities.

9-11 lessons

Glen White, director of the Training Center on Independent Living, said the 9-11 terrorist attacks helped spawn new research in the field. Four wheelchair users survived the World Trade Center towers were carried to safety using evacuation chairs provided by their employers.

“A common theme emerging from 9-11 is that there is virtually no empirical data on the safe and efficient evacuation of persons with disabilities in disaster planning,” White said.

He said many recommendations regarding evacuations are uninformed or impractical. For instance, a 1999 FEMA series published by the U.S. Fire Administration recommends that individuals mount a small “personal use” fire extinguisher on their wheelchairs.

Others are vague, such as this one: “Make sure your friends know the size of your wheelchair in case it has to be transported.”

“The Americans with Disabilities Act and the President’s New Freedom Initiative have brought more Americans with mobility and other impairments into the workplace and beyond,” White said. “We hope this study will lead to a national model that can prevent death and injury for this population in future disaster situations.”