Edwina Juillet

Meeting of October 25, 2005, Washington D.C. on Emergency Preparedness and Individuals with Disabilities:
Is the Workplace Ready?

Edwina Juillet's abiding interest is: egress for persons with disabilities. Her more than thirty year career as a healthcare risk manager is how she became attuned to the issues of emergency evacuation for persons with disabilities. The genesis of her avocation --egress for persons with disabilities-- was the enactment of the Rehabilitation Act. This evolved with a focus on issues of emergency evacuation which she continues to pursue through her work in research and codes/standards, publications. She is the co-founder the National Task Force on Fire and Life Safety for People with Disabilities, (in 1978).

Examples of her accomplishments, include:

• publication of Evacuating People with Disabilities, The World Trade Center Bombing: Report and Analysis, special issue of the Fire Engineering Magazine, December 1993; Emergency Procedures for Employees with Disabilities in Office Occupancies, Orientation Manual for First Responders on the Evacuation of People with Disabilities, printed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Fire Administration, 1995 & 2003 (respectively).
• Serving on Life Safety Code 101 main committee, and Technical Committees - Means of Egress and Board and Care (as chair).
• research project Egress Procedures and Technologies for People with Disabilities, for U.S. Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, Project Components: Literature Review, Survey of User Experience with Egress Strategies, Tactics, Facilities, and Devices, with the Findings and Recommendations Compiled in form of Draft Brochures, Draft Standards, and Reports as Co Investigator with Hughes Associates, 1987-1988.

September 11th, 2001 brought about many projects, national, local, public, private, with objective to look for and/or develop "best practice" for the emergency preparedness for/by persons with disabilities. Edwina currently serves in an technical advisory capacity for two of those projects, World Trade Center Evacuation Study being conducted by the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University and Nobody Left Behind: Disaster Preparedness for Persons with Mobility Impairment, being conducted by the University of Kansas Research and Training Center on Independent Living.

This page was last modified on October 25, 2005.