Remarks by Cheryl Heppner
Executive Director
Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons

Saving Lives: Including People with Disabilities in Emergency Planning
News Conference
April 15, 2005

The Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons serves the metropolitan area of Northern Virginia, which includes the Pentagon, two major airports, many government agencies and defense contractors, large shopping malls, and numerous places where George Washington lived, worked ate and slept.

We applaud the diligent work of the National Council on Disability and wholeheartedly support the recommendations in this report. It is our fervent hope that it becomes a blueprint for lasting change.

We find the report heartening in the way it bonds us to other people with disabilities. The disabilities may be different, but a common theme in our stories is the many unnecessary barriers we still face. As this report points out, those barriers are not new. The stories we have shared about our experiences and the lessons we have learned from past emergencies haven’t led to widespread action.

Deafness and hearing loss are about more than our ability to hear – at heart they are about the loss of communication. And make no mistake about it, that becomes a loss not just for a person who is deaf or hard of hearing, but for everyone with whom that person comes into contact. It’s crucial that attention to communication be paramount in any emergency, and particularly attention for communication for those of us who depend more on our eyes than ears for that communication. If we don’t know there is an emergency, what the emergency is, and what to do about it, any emergency plan will be worthless to us.

Approximately 190,000 deaf and hard of hearing persons reside in our Center’s service area, and many of them are parents, caretakers, supervisors or in positions where they are responsible for the health and safety of others. In recent years, we’ve seen the Pentagon in flames, lived under siege during the sniper shootings, and been pummeled by hurricanes.

Our Center believes strongly that the inclusion of people who are deaf and hard of hearing must become routine in emergency and homeland security planning. Too often plans are made for us, not with us. We have been told that planners are concentrating on getting their system in place, and they’ll talk to us later when it’s set up.

The message we get is that we are an afterthought, and therefore expendable. Our message is this: unless we are included from the beginning, no system will be effective and it will always be costly to fix it later.

During disaster drills and training exercises where deaf and hard of hearing people were involved, sometimes the only attempt to meet their needs has been asking the question, “do you lipread?” The truth is, only 35% of the English language is visible on the lips. And if you have a hearing loss, you quickly learn that when you tell someone about it, nine times out of ten they will ask you that question -- so that may be the one thing you CAN lipread. Everything after that is trouble.

Our Center has been fortunate to work with dedicated people in Arlington County, a leader in making a strong effort to reach out to people with disabilities. We also have great admiration for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which deserves much greater funding and additional staff.

For past three years our Center worked with the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy Network, a coalition of national organizations for deaf, hard of hearing, late-deafened and deaf-blind individuals, to research and write what we call “our national 9/11 Commission report”, which was released with recommendations in December 2004. We’ve documented continuing problems with televised emergency information and brought those problems to the attention of local stations and the Federal Communications Commission.

Two of our staff have become part of their local Medical Reserve Corps. We’ve worked with the national office of the American Red Cross on revisions to its “Disaster Preparedness for People with Disabilities” handbook, and with the FCC’s Media Security and Reliability Council.

But what is most exciting to us is that we recently were named one of four regional centers in the U.S. for a Community Emergency Preparedness Information Network project, under a DHS grant to Telecommunications for the Deaf. We now have a dedicated specialist on our staff who is seeking to bring together deaf and hard of hearing people, first responders, Citizen Corps members and others crucial to emergency preparedness, disaster relief and homeland security.

Our work will have the best chance of success if there is leadership at the national level. We thank the National Council on Disability for laying the groundwork to make that possible through its report and recommendations.

Cheryl Heppner, Executive Director

Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons