2006-10-06 Committee on People with Disabilities Minutes

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D. PARKS AND RECREATION REPORT A. MITCHENER No report. E. EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS L. SCADDEN M. Gleason reported that he attended a DCAB working group meeting for the 2006 Interagency Action Plan for the Emergency Preparedness of People with Disabilities and Special Health Needs on September 29 on Oahu. The purpose of the meeting was to look at the goals and objectives and see if they still made sense. The working group broke up into different groups and they addressed each goal and each new objective and made some suggestions for language change. Prior to breaking up into groups, they had reports from the State Civil Defense, Department of Health, and the Department ofHumanServices. The draft 2006 Interagency Action Plan for the Emergency Preparedness of People with Disabilities and Special Health Needs still needs some work on it before being published. There is $2 million for this coming year and they will try and retrofit 32 schools statewide within the next two years to make them shelters, 30 of them will be Level II shelters. There will be two shelters on the Big Island which will be Hilo High School and Kealakehe High School. They hope to have four shelters soon which has not been determined. The overall goal is to make all the shelters Level II shelters. There will be $2 million for the next two years, $4 million for the two years after that, and $8 million for the two years after that which will be enough to get 90 shelters within the next four or five years. The reason why they cannot do it right now is because not all of the schools have kitchen facilities or generator capacity. The $2 million is just for the retrofit which means hardening the windows in some way, making sure the doors are steel frame, and looking for generators for the schools that dont have one. The Department of Human Services indicated that all of the people with disabilities that are in the DHS system will have emergency plans in their case management plan. They are also trying to expand their base of volunteers to help in making a database of all the people. DHS is going to provide signal wrist bans to the 125 most vulnerable people in their system to wear. They have 451 people in their system who are Level II. One of the things the State Civil Defense Agency wanted to know is who is going to be coming to this Level II shelter and how many can we expect. In their planning, they designate 20 square feet for a regular person. However, they havent decided how to plan for someone with a disability such as a person in a wheelchair or has a service animal. The next meeting will be held on November 8, 2006 on Oahu. Francine Wai from DCAB would like two people from MCPD to attend the meeting. D. Cowdrey and J. Souza volunteered to attend the meeting. M. Gleason circulated a An Emergency Preparedness Packet for Hawaii Residents. 3