Extreme weather events, and the power disruptions that often accompany these crises, present unique health challenges for community members with disabilities. In this webinar, we will explore both the issues disabled people confront in these crises and promising initiatives to strengthen weather resilience.

After providing a short overview of how disability law relates to emergency contexts, we will discuss lessons learned from Winter Storm Uri and the 2021 Texas power crisis, as well as the work of the organization Upstream Access, to provide back-up power to disabled Oregonians.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this session, participants will be able to:

1. Recognize how extreme weather events, and the power outages that often accompany these events, impact the physical and mental health of disabled people.
2. Identify promising community-driven initiatives for addressing these challenges.
3. Understand how disability law relates to emergency response.

Presenters:

Angela Frederick is Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Frederick is a medical sociologist with expertise in qualitative research methods. Her work spans the areas of disability, environmental sociology, gender and family, and Hispanic/Latine college students’ paths into health fields. She is the author of the award-winning book, Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster, published by NYU Press in 2025. Frederick earned her doctorate in sociology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2012.

Erin Taylor is a passionate advocate for equity and accessibility, dedicated to dismantling ableism and fostering belonging. . She co-founded AIM-4-Access in 2022 and helped launch Upstream Access in 2023, where she advances social connection and inclusive, cross-disability emergency preparedness throughout Oregon. Erin’s work has positioned Upstream Access as the first organization in the U.S. to pilot Person-Centered Emergency Preparedness (P-CEP), a strengths-based curriculum from Australia.

A key focus of her work is power resilience, addressing the lack of backup and solar power access for disabled people during extreme weather and outages. Erin holds an M.A. in Disability Studies from CUNY and a B.A. in Communication Studies from Western Oregon University, and is disabled and a proud member of the disability and LGBTQIA+ communities.