DLU Sues New Orleans for Concealing Emergency Plans 

For media inquiries, please contact: Kate Thorstad, DLU Staff Attorney (303) 532-2471, kthorstad@disabilitylawunited.org. 

On July 17, 2024, DLU filed a lawsuit against the City of New Orleans for concealing its emergency operations plans from the public. We are asking the court to compel the release of public records detailing the city’s plans for city-assisted evacuation and paratransit, resource distribution, sheltering, and other services.  

People with disabilities are frequently the most adversely affected in emergencies and the least likely to have equal access to emergency supports due to inaccessible and inadequate emergency planning. New Orleans has long been vulnerable to hazards such as saltwater intrusion and hurricanes. People with disabilities comprised a starkly disproportionate number of those who died in Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Ida in 2021 exposed yet again how people with disabilities are failed and left behind by emergency planning.  

In 2022, the city released a “City Assisted Evacuation Plan” in response to a public record request by WWNO (New Orleans Public Radio). The disability community and experts in emergency management are eager to know if that plan has since been updated in response to constructive feedback and concerns about that plan’s administrability and lack of detail, or whether any other major accessibility gaps in emergency preparedness and response have been addressed through revisions to plans since Hurricane Ida.  

In November of 2023, we requested emergency plans from New Orleans as part of a community strategy to engage the city in improving emergency preparedness, planning, and response with and for the disability community. We received partially responsive records, including outdated and incomplete drafts of prior plans and initiatives. But the city refused to release updated emergency plans under the Louisiana Public Record Law after repeated requests over the course of six months. The city cannot collaborate with the disability community while keeping us in the dark on the details. 

Concealing the city’s emergency plans or drafts is against the public interest. Lives are at stake. The disability community cannot adequately plan and prepare for emergencies, much less collaborate with the city, if the city won’t tell the community what its plan is. Power and cell service outages after storms mean that people often cannot access information about services such as evacuation assistance or life-saving resource distribution when it is only shared after events. 

“After all the constructive criticism following Hurricane Ida in 2021 and the release of the City Assisted Evacuation Plan by WWNO in 2022, is there an actionable paratransit plan with the contracts to make it happen?” asked Kate Thorstad, Plaintiff to the case and Staff Attorney at DLU. “We don’t know. Is there an actionable plan to get disabled people life-saving water and food? We don’t know. It’s mid-storm season here. If there are actionable plans, people need to know in order to prepare. If there are no actionable plans to assist the disability community, that’s also life-saving information. And if there are no actionable plans, it’s time for the city to work with the disability community to produce concrete changes and the contracts to make them happen, not just PR statements.”  

DLU files this suit to ensure that New Orleanians know what services the city can provide and so that gaps and deficiencies in planning can be addressed with the disability community. We will continue to work with the disability community to ensure that the plans are truly actionable and address the needs of New Orleanians with disabilities.  

### 

Disability Law United (formerly known as Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center) is a nonprofit legal organization fighting for liberation through intersectional disability justice with a combination of education, legal advocacy, direct services, and impact litigation. Our work is informed by grassroots movements for systemic change and centers the concerns and goals of people with disabilities who are confronting barriers to access to programs and services and resisting oppressive legal systems in the United States.