Managing during a disaster - Corey Crawford

Speaker 1 00:30

Hello there, welcome to this episode of New Horizons, I'm Vaughn Benison, thanks for your company. You can't have missed the fact that Australia has been subject to quite a number in recent years of natural disasters. Disaster management is becoming an extremely high priority for federal and state governments and for a lot of organisations. We often talk about communications, how to manage in a disaster, shelters and in particular of concern to blind citizens Australia and you might recall we did an episode a couple of years back from a BCA Connect program, is how blind and vision impaired people manage in a natural disaster.

Corey Crawford is a policy officer with Blind Citizens Australia and lives in Western Australia. He attended the round table on information access for people with a print disability and gave the following presentation.

Speaker 2 01:21

I'm going to be talking about an upsetting, but increasingly vital topic for people living in Australia. That is accessible communications during emergency events, such as natural disasters and pandemics.

Speaker 2 01:35

And having experienced the trauma of a major natural disaster myself, I understand perfectly if you need to leave this presentation at any time. So each of us had our lives upended in various ways during the depths of the COVID -19 pandemic. Moreover, millions of Australians have been affected by recent natural disasters and extreme weather events. Nearly 70% of Australians were directly impacted by storms, cyclones, floods and or bushfires in 2022 alone. Sadly, climate scientists and health experts tell us that we can expect to experience more pandemics and natural disasters in our lifetimes. It is here, though, that we reach our first communications stumbling block.

That is our collective reticence to acknowledge the magnitude of the threats we face. In 2020, science writer Mark Linus lamented, quote, the kind of denial we all practice that allows us to keep on living our lives as usual, despite the obvious implications of what climate scientists are telling us. It's as if we don't really believe them. And as explained by the popular historian Dan Carlin, quote, we can contemplate the aftermath of nuclear war or disaster as an outcome we would wish to avoid, but it's very difficult for most people to seriously think about such things as ever happening. We innately consider civilisational collapse an imaginary situation rather than something that has actually occurred to people living before us. Now, this mentality can have dire consequences. For his 2020 book, Body Count, journalist Patty Manning interviewed numerous Australians who had personally experienced floods and bushfires.

03:28

And despite their harrowing lived experience, it was not uncommon for survivors to struggle to connect the dots between major natural disasters and the changing climate that makes these events more likely. The government policy has both reflected and fostered our collective hesitance. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority estimates that it is up to 11 times more costly to recover and rebuild after a natural disaster than it is to build resilience beforehand. Despite this, the federal government dedicated 98% of the $24 .5 billion that's spent on natural disasters between 2005 and 2022 to relief and recovery efforts. Though attitudes are shifting, our strong inclination to not think about natural disasters exposes many Australian households to mounting risk.

And it is people with disability who are most vulnerable. An article published in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management in 2018 found that people with physical disability are two to four times more likely than the general population to die or sustain injuries during a natural disaster. There are various reasons for this terrible outcome. As a starting point, people with disability are more likely to experience poverty and a lack of social support. Governments and emergency services often exacerbate this when they fail to meet the specific communication, transport and medical needs of people with disability as they prepare, evacuate and recover from natural disasters.

The end result of this, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, is that only 20% of people with disability would be able to evacuate immediately in the event of a sudden natural disaster. Government's ongoing lack of awareness of people with disability was illustrated in two recent Royal Commission reports. The final report of the Bush Fires Royal Commission, which was established in the aftermath of the 2019 -20 Black Summer, seldom mentioned the needs of people with disability. Indeed, a keyword search of the Bush Fires Royal Commission website yielded no results for the words blind or vision impaired. People in the disability sector had hoped that their needs would be more thoroughly considered in the recently concluded Disability Royal Commission's final report.

06:10

There was even a DRC emergency planning and response issues paper which was released in mid -2020 to which many people with disability, academic experts and disability representative organisations responded. Very disappointingly, there were only a couple of passing references to emergency preparedness in the DRC final report. To give an idea of how fleeting the references are, I actually overlooked them when reading through the DRC final report in September last year, despite actually going into the report wanting to find them. Had it not been for the excellent work of the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations, I would not have spotted the two brief references within the context of DRC recommendations 5 .4 and 6 .1.

This is pretty underwhelming given the three million word length of the DRC final report. So what are the consequences of government's lack of awareness? Well I was visiting family in Rochester in Central Victoria when a major riverine flood hit in October 2022. And as fate would have it, the next door neighbour was a volunteer in the Country Fire Authority and a lifelong Rochester resident. This CFA volunteer personally rescued five people who were blind or vision impaired from floodwaters that came up to waist height in some of the houses in the suburb. Had it not been for this volunteer's heroism, initiative and detailed knowledge of the local community, the situation in Rochester probably would have been far more tragic than it was. A lone CFA volunteer had to save the day because the state emergency services had been overwhelmed by major flooding events across several parts of Victoria.

The SES did not even know how many of its own volunteers and crews. It had active in Rochester during and after the flood peak. Now I'm not knocking the SES volunteers. They did the best they could in what were very trying circumstances. My point is that without strong local connections, people with a disability can be all too easily forgotten amidst the chaos of natural disasters. In 2020, researchers from Curtin University, one of whom Katie spoke earlier and addressed some of the issues that I'm mentioning now.

Researchers from Curtin University found that more than 90% of people who are blind or vision impaired and aged under 65 use a smartphone. For people under 35, it's 98%. Smartphone technology therefore seems an obvious solution to communications deficiencies during emergency events. Unfortunately, this is not how recent crises have played out in Australia. During the Black Summer bushfires, some blind or vision impaired users of the fires near me app found various features, including lists, maps and watch... [? some words deleted] 

Similarly, the federal government's now defunct COVID safe app featured buttons that were not labeled. The app also affected some glucose monitoring equipment for people with diabetes. People for whom the COVID safe app was inaccessible or dangerous often simply deleted it.  When combined with the inconsistencies of hastily arranged QR codes at shot fronts and the inaccessibility of COVID testing and vaccination processes, it is not surprising that a 2021 survey conducted by Vision Australia found that 52% of people who are blind or vision impaired felt socially isolated during the pandemic.

09:53

So what can be done to address some of these problems? The organisations you represent can take action. That's what BCA did in its collaboration with the kindness pandemic. Together, we launched an awareness campaign, an action campaign calling on people to hashtag be that person. The campaign encouraged members of the community to be the one to ask if someone needed help if they noticed them struggling. Organisations can also make submissions to government proposing clear recommendations. In a detailed submission to the Department of Home Affairs on improving government responses to natural disasters last September, for example, BCA echoed Disability Advocacy Network Australia's call for the federal government to work with states and territories to establish a disability disaster management centre within the National Emergency Management Agency.

Now, perhaps because we were on their radar as a result of our submission, earlier this year BCA was invited by the Department of Home Affairs to contribute feedback on the federal government's advertising and messaging about emergency events, particularly terrorist attacks. BCA also actively participates in the Now governments may or may not respond to the recommendations we make. As such, it falls to disability representative organisations to encourage our members to undertake their own person centred emergency preparedness, or PSEP. PSEP encourages people with disability to consider their own unique needs before an emergency occurs. People with disability can complete a detailed emergency checklist, create an emergency pack, and establish an emergency support circle of family, friends, and medical professionals to render assistance during an emergency.

BCO also developed an extensive policy report on emergency preparedness last year. It provides additional details which you may not have considered. For example, the enduring relevance of radio broadcasting in today's increasingly digitalised world. Though many people no longer listen to traditional broadcasts over the airwaves, the ABC's analogue radio broadcasts reach 99% of the Australian population. Radio services are a vital source of information, especially when television, mobile phone networks, and the internet are not available during natural disasters. As such, the federal government recently provided funding to upgrade and expand the ABC's emergency radio broadcast systems. I hasten to add that radio is not a perfect medium. The oral nature of radio poses accessibility problems for people with deaf blindness and for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Furthermore, poor -quality radio broadcasts spread misinformation and cause significant fear, including for people who are blind or vision impaired in the aftermath of the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. As is often the case, when it comes to disability, there are no simple solutions. For more information, including a full list of references, I would encourage you to please read BCA's Risk Reduction, Resilience and Response Policy Report and the Associated Emergency Checklist. You can find them on the BCA website, in the Policy and Advocacy Hub. You are also welcome to contact me by email. That's quarrywithne .crawford at bca .org .au. And BCA's toll-free phone number is 1 -800 -033 -660.

Speaker 1 13:39

Corey Crawford there, Policy Officer with Blind Citizens Australia. If you'd like to contact BCA 1800 033 660 is the number, 1 -800 -033 -660. Or of course you can email bca@bca.org.au ... BCA at BCA dot org dot AU. I'm Vaughn Benison, I'll speak to you again next week.