Over 275,000 people were killed in Indonesia and surrounding islands in the south Pacific when a tsunami was spurred by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean in 2004. A mere seven years later, Japan suffered a similar disaster, that while not on par in the scale of human loss, combined dangerous radioactive conditions and a five-figure death toll.

When critical national emergencies strike, be they natural or man-made, among the hardest hit portions of society are those with disabilities. While it is difficult to stratify any part of society during a national tragedy, many people with disabilities can suffer from multiple and acute medical conditions, severe poverty, and few resources to respond in a manner proposed by emergency disaster plans that assume an able population ready to respond to the vicissitudes of disaster scenarios.

National recovery from severe disasters is a painful process, but one that should remind us of the proper role in disaster management and recovery through the revision of plans aimed at distressed communities. In an article published by Mark Priestley and Laura Hemingway, they argue that national preparedness to disaster must rebalance our approach to disabilities, away from the individual and toward the social model of disaster management and reconstruction.

Under the individual approach, disaster management takes on the form of treating the symptoms of disaster, including medical care, post-traumatic stress disorder and ensuring a base-line in terms of access to shelter and food. Lacking in response, Priestley and Hemingway argue, is a social approach, where disability is not thought of as an individual impairment in need of direct medical attention and repair, but one that views disability as a natural pattern of human experience that requires institutional change to address.

U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate has taken great strides at attacking the problem of emergency preparedness by providing plans for increased shelter access for immobilized or impaired people, increased education to emergency responders, and providing unique guidelines while interacting with persons with disabilities that not only recognizes unique features of any impairment, but uses existing support groups as valuable allies in assisted emergency response.

This approach, while still growing in wide-spread use, allows officials to switch the issue away from the individual and weave every part of the community into a direct line among those in need of services and assistance. Indeed, Japan, with an elderly population that makes up 23% of the country as a whole, will need even more work in the future when another disaster strikes.

Without a doubt, emergencies and national disasters will never disappear, nor will those people in need of our greatest support. As Japan takes great strides in recovery and reconstruction, they can take this time, as Priestley and Hemingway again suggest, to help rebuild a new society from the rubble. They can redesign accessible homes and public space, help mitigate the loss of life that will effect a person’s care, and in many ways shift the national response toward a new paradigm, one of inclusion and natural impairment that turns a national disaster into a moment to rebuild an even better future.