Lydia Chung illuminates the structural ableism in disaster response design.
‘Vulnerable populations’ are often viewed as most at risk during crises. But this position feels insufficient to me.
Throughout my time volunteering at Camp Acorn, a residential summer camp for individuals with disabilities in Mahwah, New Jersey, I worked directly with children whose needs were as varied as they were specific. As the camp counselor, I supported campers with conditions ranging from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to Down syndrome to cerebral palsy. Some needed more time to process instructions before they could act on them. Others relied on physical assistance for tasks that some of us perform without a second thought: getting dressed, transferring to and from a wheelchair, navigating uneven ground. My role was not to do things for the people I was supporting, but to bridge the gap between what they found easy and what the world around them made unnecessarily difficult.
I remember one afternoon when a pool activity came to a near standstill because the ramp structure surrounding it left no room for a camper who used a wider (than the ramp) mobility device. There was nothing wrong with the child. There was everything wrong with the ramp. In these moments, the fact that ‘vulnerability’ is not inherent stands out. ‘Vulnerability’ felt built and imposed- engineered by a world that had simply forgotten to include certain people in its original blueprints.
The designation of certain groups as ‘vulnerable populations’ operates as an important framework within medical and disaster discourse. Senior political figures, such as President George Bush, used the phrase ‘vulnerable populations’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, stating the need to protect “our most vulnerable people” (Bush, 2005). Through closer examination, however, this terminology reveals a critical limitation: it frames vulnerability as a characteristic of particular bodies rather than a condition produced through systemic design. More specifically, emergency response systems, themselves, are often structured around a “default body”—one that is mobile, independent, and able to rapidly respond to instructions. Evacuation protocols assume the ability to walk, drive, or access transportation. Communication systems presume one can hear, see, or process information quickly. Shelters often lack accommodation for medical equipment or ongoing care.
This prompts the question: if emergency response frameworks are structured around a presumed ‘default body’, on what grounds can they claim to be equitable? Why do we continue to design systems as though populations are homogeneous, despite the clear and pervasive reality of human heterogeneity?
Systemic Failure
There are instances where society has failed to actively address the needs of marginalised populations within disaster scenarios. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami offer a potent example. Out of approximately 15,901 deaths from the tsunami, 56% were aged 65 and older- many being people who experienced mobility limitations or required assistance to evacuate from specific sites (UNDRR, 2012). Individuals with disabilities were reported to have significantly higher mortality rates than the general population in some of the hardest-hit prefectures (Hoffman, 2017). This is not because of their inherent fragility. It is because evacuation infrastructures have presumed a body capable of speed, instantaneous response, and autonomy. For many, it was not simply delayed but structurally foreclosed. They were constrained by inaccessible transportation, fragmented care networks: the attendants, family members, and neighbours whose help made daily life possible, networks already thin and informal before disaster struck, were quick to collapse when caregivers were displaced, medical supplies ran out, or the quiet arrangements holding someone’s life together simply broke. Protocols were enacted that encoded independence as a baseline condition for survival. Even the act of warning was unevenly distributed: alerts presupposed the ability to hear, to see, to cognitively process urgency in standardised ways, rendering danger more immediately legible to some people over others. What emerges from these statistics is not solely a record of disproportionate death, but a narrative of whose lives disaster response systems are designed to save.
Alison Kafer’s Curative Time
In Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) scholar Alison Kafer argues that dominant culture operates according to a curative imaginary; a belief system in which disability is understood as a problem to be fixed, eliminated, or left behind on the road toward a normative future (Kafer, 2013). Kafer explicitly states that curative time is the temporal logic that solidifies this imaginary since it presumes that (1) progress moves in a linear direction; (2) that the future is a site of bodily correction and restoration; and (3) that those who cannot be cured—who do not conform to normalised standards of bodily function—are implicitly excluded from that future (Kafer, 2013).
This temporal framework has substantial consequences when imported into emergency responses: disaster protocols are not spatial arrangements; they are deeply temporal ones. Evacuation orders carry implied deadlines while warning systems communicate urgency calibrated to a body presumed capable of unassisted action. Triage frameworks consistently rank survival by speed of recovery and projected return to productivity. Each of these structures encodes a version of curative time. The ‘good’ disaster survivor moves quickly, recovers efficiently, and returns to normalcy on a predictable schedule. During Hurricane Katrina, most evacuation buses deployed in New Orleans lacked wheelchair lifts, leaving many disabled residents unable to evacuate even after warnings had been issued (Frieden, 2006). Similarly, emergency shelters lacked access to electricity necessary for ventilators, refrigerated medication, or other medical equipment, exposing how disaster infrastructure continues to presume a body capable of surviving independently and without ongoing technological support (Frieden, 2006).
Kafer’s framework reminds us that failures documented in disasters- like Hurricane Katrina and the Tohoku earthquake- are not merely failures of resources or planning. They are failures of imagination. The systems themselves, and those who designed them, fail to imagine a heterogeneous global population that emergency systems are supposed to be enacted to preserve. An evacuation system assuming ambulatory speed is not simply impractical for those with disabilities; it creates the judgment that their survival is secondary, or, in more eugenic terms, structurally inconvenient. The urgency extended to others is not extended to them. Why? Not because there was not enough time, but because the foundational system was never built with their time in mind. The question that follows, then, is not simply critique. It is an obligation: if disaster response systems have been built around exclusion, what does it look like to rebuild them around inclusion?
Translating Standardisation into Inclusive Design
Through the examination of various studies from the National Institute of Health (NIH), I propose that the answer lies in a study conducted by assistant professor Sevda Demiröz Yıldırım, affiliated with the Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University. Yildirim offers concrete architecture for reforming the evacuation system. Stakeholders interviewed in the study were those with disabilities, caregivers, emergency responders, healthcare workers, and representatives from disability advocacy organisations, and they all called for disability and residential registries to accelerate aid delivery, dedicated response teams, joint training programmes, and meaningful representation of these groups at the governance level of disaster institutions (Yıldırım, 2025). This final demand is the most crucial. It repositions individuals with disabilities from passive recipients of emergency response to agents within its design.
About the author
Lydia Chung is an intern at Line Dental, where she has conducted independent research on the potential for Clinacanthus nutans extract to reduce biofilm. She also serves as a counselor at Camp Acorn, where she works at the intersection of disability, community, and care.
References
Alison Kafer. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Demiröz Yıldırım, Sevda. 2025. “Inclusiveness of Disaster Management for Persons with Disabilities in Türkiye from Stakeholders’ Perspective.” Scientific Reports 15: 22779.
Forman-Hoffman, Valerie L., Kimberly L. Ault, Wayne L. Anderson, Joshua M. Weiner, Alissa Stevens, Vincent A. Campbell, and Brian S. Armour. 2015. “Disability Status, Mortality, and Leading Causes of Death in the United States Community Population.” Medical Care 53, no. 4: 346–354.
George W. Bush. 2005. “Address to the Nation on Hurricane Katrina Recovery,” September 15,
National Council on Disability. 2006. “The Impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on People with Disabilities: A Look Back and Remaining Challenges.” Washington, DC: National Council on Disability, August 3. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED496270.pdf
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). 2012. “Japan Quake Took Toll on Women and Elderly,” March 12 . https://www.undrr.org/news/japan-quake-took-toll-women-and-elderly
