ADA Best Practices Tool Kit for State and Local Governments

B. Accessibility

• Ensure that the sheltering program is accessible to people with disabilities. Disasters and emergencies are unpredictable. Even the best emergency managers cannot say with certainty when an emergency will strike, how extensive the damage will be, and which shelters will remain available to house people who must evacuate their homes. For most people, any building designated as a shelter will meet their basic emergency needs so long as it provides a safe place to eat, sleep, and take care of personal hygiene needs. But an emergency shelter is of little use to a person using a wheelchair if it has steps at the entrance or toilet rooms she cannot use. 
  
  Under the ADA, emergency sheltering programs must not exclude or deny benefits to people with disabilities.³ Emergency managers and shelter operators should therefore seek to ensure that shelters are physically accessible to people with disabilities, including people who use wheelchairs. Before designating a facility as an emergency shelter, emergency managers and shelter operators need to determine if it is accessible. Elements such as a shelter’s parking, walkway to the entrance, entrance, toilets, bathing facilities, drinking fountains, sleeping area, food distribution and dining quarters, first aid/medical unit, emergency notification system, and other activity and recreation areas need to be examined for barriers. Government facilities built since 1992 and private business facilities built since 1993 are often the best candidates for emergency shelters because they were subject to ADA requirements for physical accessibility when they were built.⁴ Some older facilities have been altered to provide physical accessibility⁵ or can be made physically accessible by using temporary measures stored on site and readily available for use in the event an emergency occurs. Other older facilities are poor candidates for emergency shelters because they have barriers that are too expensive or infeasible to remove. For guidance on emergency shelter accessibility, please see the Department of Justice’s “ADA Checklist for Emergency Shelters” at www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap7shelterchk.htm. The checklist includes two assessment tools to ensure that emergency shelters provide access to all: (1) a preliminary checklist that will help emergency managers and shelter operators decide if a facility has the characteristics that make it a good candidate for a potential emergency shelter, and (2) a more detailed checklist that will help identify and remove the most common barriers to physical accessibility.