Emergencies / Disasters

Updated  01.22.26

About June: June Isaacson Kailes is a Disability Policy Consultant known for implementing practical methods for inclusive emergency planning, response, and recovery. She helps organizations move beyond vague compliance by operationalizing measurable competencies, standard operating procedures, and just-in-time checklists. This page features her current content of checklists, reports, training resources, and implementation guidance.

Learn more:  About June, Emergency Experience, Contact

New in 2025

Drills and Exercises

Guidance for Integrating People with Disabilities in Emergency Drills and Exercises (pdf), Edition 2, 2020,easier to use format with updated content [see Edition 2015 below] including:

  • Identifying and Recruiting Qualified Disability Subject Matter Experts
  • Roles for Qualified Disability Subject Matter Experts
  • Use Real Actors with Disabilities
  • Budget
  • Recruiting
  • Location Accessibility
  • Timing
  • Communication Access for All Participants and Actors
  • Disability-related Inject Ideas
  • Participation in Hot Wash
  • Samples: Request for Participants and Actor’s Guide – What to Know Before You Go!

Guidance for Integrating People with Disabilities in Emergency Drills, Table Tops and Exercises Edition 1, (2015) – Guidance prepared for North Carolina Emergency Management. It uses the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) Master Task List format, commonly employed in the field, to provide a set of guiding principles for exercise programs and a shared approach to exercise program management, design, development, conduct, evaluation, and improvement planning. The second column highlights new steps to recruit, accommodate, include, and gather feedback from people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs in exercises. It also includes suggestions for injects tailored to specific exercises.

Emergency Registries

People who advocate for support of emergency registries for people with disabilities, understandably, want quick and simple solutions. Registries ignore the complexity of emergency planning and response. It is tokenistic, disingenuous, and irresponsible to urge people who may need disaster help to rely on registries. Real solutions emerge from specific, actionable, tested, and sustainable responses, rather than theoretical or fantasy-based plans.

These registry resource pages provide a deeper exploration of registries and include:

flowchart and assessment tool for making decisions about using a registry

Etiquette to Actionable Practice

Moving Beyond Etiquette to Actionable Practice Competencies  (blog). Etiquette, awareness, and sensitivity target superficial niceties and politeness. It is only scratching the surface when addressing disability implicit biases, discrimination, and lack of access and accommodations that people with disabilities often face. Focusing on etiquette falls short when translating the complexities of best practices and the core requirements of civil rights laws into concrete actions and skills. We must go beyond mere etiquette to achieve meaningful, lasting change and civil rights compliance.

Two Podcasts:

Moving Beyond Etiquette to Actionable Practice Competencies 11 minutes
Moving Beyond Etiquette to Actionable Practice Competencies 16 minutes

Video:

FAST (Functional Assessment Service Teams) 

This article and podcast explore the history, present status, and future opportunities and challenges of Functional Assessment Service Teams (FAST). A basic description of FAST is that it involves teams of government and community partners with disability-specific skills that are deployed to provide the support needed. These supports help people with disabilities participate in disaster planning, response, recovery, and mitigation to protect their health, safety, and independence. The content explains the historical motivation behind FAST, highlighting past discrimination and the need for inclusive emergency services based on a social model of disability. The article and podcast examine the original goals of these teams, stressing collaboration and the involvement of individuals with lived experience. The discussion covers the current state of FAST, noting variations and challenges like funding issues and the shift toward government-only teams. Finally, both explore future prospects, proposing ways to improve and grow FAST programs, such as expanding their focus beyond shelters, diversifying team composition, and enhancing training and evaluation methods.

Favorite Disaster Quotes and Juneisms

Includes:

  • Quotes – 4 Stages of Disaster, Clear, simple, and wrong, Denial, Impact, Training and exercises, Words
  • Juneisms – Quotes from June – Data paradox, Disability, Dogma, Impact and time needed to achieve change, Inclusion, Individual preparedness, Lessons to apply, Planning, Public engagement, Registries, Rhetoric, Training, education, testing, and exercising

Health Plan Emergency Practices

Individual Preparedness

Public Engagement

Return on Investments in Public Engagement in Domestic Preparedness, 2024, (PDF), (Word)

Reports

Getting It Wrong: An Indictment with a Blueprint for Getting It Right, Disability Rights, Obligations and Responsibilities Before, During and After Disasters Edition 1 (May 2018) 

Southern California Wildfires After Action Report (2008)

Services and Checklists

Checklist for Integrating People with Disabilities and Others with Access and Functional Needs into Emergency Planning, Response & Recovery (2020 – updated, 2014)

Defining Functional Needs – Updating CMIST (2017) –  results from the evolving of terminology as well as the clarity, precision, and specificity of practice. CMIST is a framework to help people remember and plan for the five functional needs individuals may have in an emergency or disaster: communication; maintaining health; independence; support, safety, and self-determination; and transportation. Emergency plans that focus on optimizing function rather than on “specialness” increase the success of accommodating predictable needs. For instance, knowing that someone has survived a stroke does not reveal their functional needs for maintaining health, safety, and independence, which can vary from none to many. 

Functional Needs Focused Care and Shelter Checklist (2009)

Inclusive Event Procedures for Emergencies, Edition I, October 2017 – Procedures need to anticipate the needs of everyone. Planning should recognize that there will be attendees with disabilities who may need evacuation or other assistance in an emergency. These attendees have a variety of disabilities (mobility, breathing, allergies, hearing, seeing, reading, understanding, or chronic conditions) and may have difficulty or be unable to: use stairwells, hear alarms, see or read exit signs, or understand instructions. Contents include: applying emergency planning strategies, safety considerations for site selection, projecting numbers of attendees with disabilities, a checklist for inclusive emergency safety briefings for attendees, emergency planning with event facilities staff, and more resources. Readers should use this guidance in conjunction with  information found in “Accessible Meetings, Events, and Conferences Guide.” 

Moving Beyond “Special Needs” A function-based framework for emergency management and planning, (2007)

Planning Checklist for Rapid Emergency Response for Organizations Serving People with Disabilities Edition 1.4 (2018) pdf.  Rapid emergency response aligns with the core services and values of disability-focused organizations that engage in systems advocacy to protect people’s civil rights and right to self-determination. This guidance and checklist are for organizations that support the health, safety, interdependence, and independence of people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs. Use it to evaluate critical elements of emergency response and recovery, identify areas needing attention, set priorities, and continue to assess progress. Four elements include::

  • Continuity of Operations / Ensuring Service Continuation – Can your organization continue to provide services? Are staff familiar with (drilled and practiced) emergency procedures for different scenarios? Can communication among staff and clients be maintained during and after an emergency? Are there plans for emergency staffing, supplies, coordination, decision-making, data access, mutual aid, emergency messaging, and updating emergency plans??
  • Client-Focused Emergency Actions – What steps is your organization taking to help the people you serve prepare for and maintain their emergency plans? Are plans in place to provide life-safety checks to a pre-identified segment of the people you serve?
  • Community Partnerships, Connecting and Networking – Does your organization participate in meetings, workshops, and community gatherings that focus on emergency planning?
  • Outside Service Contracts, Agreements, and Memorandums of Understanding – Have you identified which services your organization will offer for a fee or free to local and state governments and established agreements for fee-based services?

Serving and Protecting All by Applying Lessons Learned – Including People with Disabilities and Seniors in Disaster Services (2006) 

Standard, Accessible, and Medical Cots (2009)

The National Shelter System and Physical Accessibility – Time to Look Under the Hood (2017) — emphasizes physical accessibility as one of many criteria used by the American Red Cross’s National Shelter System (NSS). This focus on facility access is driven by frequent feedback (from my roles as a trainer, consultant, and policy analyst) from emergency management professionals, who often say they don’t need to survey their mass care sites for physical accessibility because they rely on the information in the NSS. The information in this article is based on informal discussions with American Red Cross staff and volunteers. These talks revealed inconsistent and sometimes conflicting information about NSS. A list of questions and concerns is included regarding NSS’s data accuracy, surveyor skills, and consistency in enforcing standardized policies across divisions and regions. For example, different versions of physical access questions seem to be used in NSS and in various regions.

Training

Training: Maximizing Your ROI! (2017) In the emergency management world, applying lessons can mean the difference between life and death for people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs. It’s about impact and outcomes. The goal is not just lessons observed, documented, or heard about, but lessons repeatedly applied, so we can eventually claim them as lessons learned.

Recent disaster response efforts have highlighted and reinforced the need to modernize our current training models. Time and budgets for training are very limited. We must ensure that the initial investment in developing training does not become trapped in outdated learning and evaluation methods. The content offers 6 “How’s” for modernizing training.

  1. Refresh content and materials frequently
  2. Train teams
  3. Elevate importance of exercises
  4. Use spaced reinforced interval learning
  5. Put equal emphasis on just-in-time training
  6. Use evaluation methods that measure delivery effectiveness, performance, impact and outcomes

Transit Evacuation 

Trust

Building Trust in Emergency Planning and Response Podcast(2025) 21 minutes:

Building Trust in Emergency Planning and Response Podcast(2025) 21 minutes.

Archives (jik.com)

Resources for people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs, emergency managers, planners, and community-based organizations, individual preparedness, training, research reports, and more.