As wildfires spur thousands of evacuations across small cities and rural areas of Oregon, disability rights advocates are alleging in a lawsuit that Portland and Multnomah County are not prepared to help people with disabilities during a disaster.
FILE - Portland, seen from Pittock Mansion, June 8, 2021.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
“People with disabilities deserve to survive when there’s a natural disaster,” said Jake Cornett, executive director and CEO of Disability Rights Oregon, which filed the lawsuit Tuesday alongside the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Law United.
“Over the last 25 years we’ve too frequently seen stories about people with disabilities being victims,” Cornett said.
Officials with Portland and Multnomah County governments declined to comment on the lawsuit or on changes they’ve made since 2021, citing the pending litigation.
People with disabilities were disproportionately harmed by the 2021 heat wave that killed 69 people in Multnomah County, Cornett said. And many who survived said they struggled to get access to emergency information or to reach cooling centers.
In the midst of that heat wave, one woman who relied on public services for transportation was dropped off outside the wrong house. Ashlyn Maddox, who was disabled, never made it inside. She died of hyperthermia that day, after temperatures soared to 116 degrees.
“That case has, frankly, haunted us since we investigated it,” Cornett said, “and we’ve been working to look for a path to address the failures of the city and county so that incident doesn’t happen again.”
Later that year, the Portland auditor looked into the city’s emergency management system and described in its report a government “not prepared to meet the needs of people with disabilities” during a disaster. The auditor found that the situation put the city at risk of lawsuits.
According to the lawsuit, Portland and Multnomah County are not reliably providing emergency alerts to people who are deaf and blind. Shelters are not all accessible to wheelchair users. Some shelters can’t handle service animals, or can’t reliably chill medication that must be refrigerated. Neither jurisdiction has a plan for people who rely on electricity to power medical equipment if the region experiences a blackout, it says.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to order Portland and Multnomah County to update emergency plans and response efforts to include the needs of people with disabilities. It also seeks to have the city and county pay the legal costs associated with the suit, and to award monetary damages to be determined later.
Cornett said he would prefer a resolution outside of court that addresses the needs of disabled people.
In a 2023 review of progress made in emergency planning for people with disabilities, the city auditor’s office said Portland had taken small steps to address concerns found in its 2021 audit, including with staff who were involved in assessing medical equipment needs at shelters. But since then, budget cuts have been a barrier to meeting Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, the auditor’s office has reported.
Advocates filed their suit against Portland and Multnomah County a week after The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that Portland could be at risk of a devastating urban wildfire similar to the blazes that devastated Los Angeles in 2025. Those fires destroyed 13,000 homes and killed 31 people – 26 of them older than 65 or living with a disability. Among the dead: A father and son who both used wheelchairs and were waiting for help to evacuate when the flames arrived.
“Portland is less prepared than LA,” Cornett said. “Watching those fires rip through the city of LA and leave to the deaths of multiple people with disabilities because there was no plan to get them out of the way of the fire in time, that is what we are trying to prevent here in Portland.”
As climate disasters like extreme heat, fires, hurricanes and flooding become more common, people with disabilities have been disproportionately affected around the globe. Michael Stein, head of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, said in a 2023 article in Harvard Law Today that they are at least twice as likely to die or be injured in these disasters, and they sometimes lose access to independent living afterward.
