When UT Austin student Fabiola Amaya heard the fire alarm blare through her dorm, she felt a sense of panic. Unlike the rest of her peers, Amaya couldn’t immediately evacuate the building. She was told to stay put and wait for further instructions.
Amaya uses a power wheelchair, and at the time she lived on campus with her mother, who serves as her full-time caregiver. Unlike many other universities and community colleges across Texas, UT Austin doesn’t have evacuation chairs in any of its buildings.
“It was about 20 minutes of me not knowing what was happening, the alarm going off, everyone around me having been evacuated except for my mom and I, who stayed behind with me as my caregiver,” Amaya said. “It was a very traumatizing situation.”
Fortunately, the smoke was limited to the dorm basement, but Amaya said she couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened in a more extreme situation.
In the two years since that incident, Amaya has worked to get her story before the state Legislature in hopes of mandating accessible evacuation procedures across all public universities in Texas.
Amaya was able to get Senate Bill 752 before Texas lawmakers this session with the help of state Sen. José Menendez, D-San Antonio, who authored the bill. If signed into law, the bill would require all public postsecondary institutions to install “emergency evacuation assistance devices” for people with disabilities.
“Evacuation chairs are designed to go up and down stairs and only require one person, so it’s a pretty accessible and easy way to get someone out in an emergency,” Amaya said. “The best possible outcome would be for disabled individuals to be included in ideally all emergency procedures following this [bill], but especially fires.”
Amaya said the Americans with Disabilities Act requires all public institutions to have an evacuation plan that accommodates students who need assistance, but each campus has its own interpretation of that policy. She described the ADA as the “ground level” of a building, and it’s up to each university to build on top of it.
Many postsecondary institutions in Texas already have evacuation devices across their campuses, including UT El Paso, the University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University, Austin Community College and Texas Tech University.
According to UT Austin’s Emergency Operations Plan, students in need of assistance are supposed to wait in their “designated staging area” for an escort. When asked to discuss the protocol further in an interview with the Texas Standard, the university responded with an email statement saying it follows Texas code requirements and establishes “areas of refuge” for people who can’t evacuate independently.
“Because our population moves around a great deal, it is difficult to know who will be in a building at any given time, and people who are unfamiliar or trained how to use evacuation chairs can be injured (or injure the person they are trying to transport) while using them,” wrote Scott Philip, security and communications manager for the Office of Security and Emergency Management at UT Austin.
Philip also noted that a majority of UT’s buildings are “fully sprinkled” and first responders are able to get on site quickly. However, Amaya said her wheelchair is at risk of malfunctioning if it gets wet.
Disability rights organizer Linda Litzinger said training for evacuation chairs is fairly easy and could be incorporated into required training for resident assistants and other university employees.
Litzinger works for Texas Parent to Parent, an educational and advocacy nonprofit for parents of children with disabilities. She’s been working alongside Amaya to garner support for SB 752 from lawmakers at the Texas Capitol.
“We’re all parents or self-advocates at Texas Parent to Parent, so in my case I already have lived experience with having a daughter born with quadriplegia in a college dorm,” Litzinger said. “When [Amaya] called me, I knew exactly what they were talking about.”
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Since its filing in January, two other Texas senators have co-sponsored SB 752: Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, and Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo. State Rep. Mary González, D-Clint, also filed an identical bill in the Texas House, which was referred to the Higher Education Committee earlier this month.
With thousands of bills under review at this Capitol this session, policies that aren’t a part of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s top priorities are moving more slowly through the legislative process. SB 752 is currently pending in the Senate Education Committee K-16, where it hasn’t seen an update since mid-March.
Despite the stagnancy, Amaya continues to push for her bill to become law.
“I made these flyers that we’re printing out and handing to people at the Capitol to spread word about the bill because a lot of people don’t even understand that the issue is happening, let alone that a bill is being filed for it,” Amaya said. “We’re also having other people come and testify. … It’s a lot of just raising awareness of the issue and trying to push it forward.”
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