FEMA to focus on children’s needs during disasters

WASHINGTON — The Federal Emergency Management Agency is going to plan more broadly for children and their needs as the government prepares for disasters.

“Children are not small adults,” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said Monday.

Most disaster plans are crafted around adult populations, and people with specific needs — such as children — are often an afterthought, Fugate said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A new FEMA working group will work with the congressionally mandated National Commission on Children and Disasters, created in 2007. The FEMA group will focus on specific guidance for evacuating, sheltering and relocating children; helping childcare centers, schools and child welfare programs prepare for disasters; and making disaster preparation part of the Homeland Security Department’s grant programs.

The working group’s findings could mean changes to the country’s blueprint for disaster response, known as the National Response Framework, Fugate said.

The Bush administration rewrote this national disaster plan after Hurricane Katrina. The new 82-page plan, issued in January 2008, does not include the word “children,” but it does mention pets. That plan, however, is supplemented by more than 200 pages of annexes, which do address children’s needs, though not in depth.

“Let’s look at children not as something we’re going to deal with after we write the plan,” Fugate said.

He said he intends to draw more heavily on existing federal, state and local programs that already deal with children “in every community every day.”