The morning after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, I listened to a recording someone posted from Yabucoa. Not the wind. The aftermath. Water moving through a concrete house at a pace that suggested it had no intention of leaving. Furniture knocking against walls in a rhythm that was almost musical, almost patient. And underneath it, a sound I know from a different context entirely: the low hum of a space that has changed its dimensions. The room was smaller now. The water had redrawn it.
I played that recording eleven times. Not because I am morbid. Because I recognized something in it that took me weeks to name.
Here is what I eventually understood: that sound — the reorganized room, the architecture made unfamiliar by disaster — is a sound I have known my whole life. Every room I enter is a room I must rebuild through echo, through the tap of my cane, through the way my voice returns to me off surfaces I cannot see. Disaster makes sighted people into beginners at a thing disabled people have been doing forever. And instead of asking us what we know, the emergency plans leave us to die.
The body that already knows
Sins Invalid published a framework in 2019 that names what should be obvious: disability justice is climate justice. Not as metaphor. Not as coalition branding. As material fact. The communities hit first and worst by climate disaster — Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor — are the same communities where disability rates are highest, where medical infrastructure is thinnest, where evacuation plans assume a body that can walk, drive, hear a siren, read a printed sign.
You might say: but emergency management has gotten better. ADA compliance, accessible shelters, notification systems.
It hasn’t. Not where it counts.
In August 2005, when Katrina drowned New Orleans, the buses sent for evacuation were not wheelchair accessible. Hospitals lost generator power and staff made triage decisions about which patients were worth carrying down flights of stairs. The death rate among disabled people was disproportionate. This is documented. What is less discussed: the sensory architecture of the disaster itself. The sounds that preceded the flood. The alarms that were visual only. The emergency broadcasts that assumed literacy, sight, hearing, a working television. The entire warning system was built for one kind of body.
Nineteen years later, in October 2024, when Hurricane Milton bore down on Florida’s Gulf Coast, disability rights attorney Shira Wakschlag of The Arc told reporters that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were still being turned away from shelters because staff didn’t know how to accommodate them. Still. The same coast, the same storm season pattern, the same exclusion dressed in new emergency management jargon.
Two storms. Two decades apart. The gap between them carries the argument I will not bother stating.
What the siren doesn’t say
I lost my sight when I was six. Retinal detachment, left eye first, then the right a year later. I remember color but I have stopped trusting the memories. What I trust is sound. Not as consolation. As intelligence.
When a tornado siren goes off, I hear things sighted people do not. I hear the direction it’s pointing, which tells me which neighborhood the warning prioritizes. I hear the decay pattern — how the sound bounces off buildings versus open ground — which tells me about the built environment between me and the siren. I hear whether windows are open or closed in the houses around me based on how the siren’s upper frequencies scatter.
None of this is superpower. It is skill developed by necessity, refined by attention, and ignored by every emergency planner I have ever spoken to.
Pauline Oliveros spent decades developing what she called Deep Listening — a practice of attending to the full sonic environment, not just the sounds you expect or want. She did this work partly at the DAVI (Deep Listening Institute) in Kingston, New York, through the 2000s and up until her death in 2016. She once said that listening is not the same as hearing; listening is a directed attention, a decision to treat sound as knowledge rather than noise. She was describing something that blind people do as a condition of existence. We are not practitioners of a method. We are the method’s origin point, uncredited.
When climate disaster hits, the first information is acoustic. The wind changes. Water sounds different when it rises past a threshold — there is a specific shift in pitch when standing water reaches a depth that will knock a person off their feet. I know this the way I know when a room has a drop ceiling versus exposed beams: by how my footstep returns to me. This is not poetry. It is data. It is the kind of data that emergency response ignores because it cannot be entered into a GIS system.
The evacuation route is a hearing test
Georgina Kleege wrote in Sight Unseen — published in 1999 but still ahead of most conversations happening now — that blind people often understand visual culture better than sighted people, precisely because we have had to think about it. Sighted people swim in visual information without examining it. We stand outside and study the water.
The same inversion applies to climate adaptation. Disabled people understand precarity better than the emergency management professionals who write plans for us without consulting us. We understand supply chains because we depend on them for medications, equipment, daily survival. We understand infrastructure failure because we live with it on ordinary Tuesdays, not just during hurricanes. We understand what it means when a system assumes your body will cooperate, because every system assumes that.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has written and spoken about this extensively — in The Future Is Disabled, published in 2022, and in interviews where she names the survival skills that disabled, sick, and Mad communities have already built. Mutual aid networks. Flexible care webs. The understanding that interdependence is not weakness but strategy. What she describes is not a theory of climate resilience. It is climate resilience, already functioning, already tested, built by people the state considers disposable.
Dance, dissolution, the body that moves different
Sins Invalid — the disability justice performance project based in San Francisco — has been staging this argument in flesh since 2006. Their performers move in wheelchairs, on crutches, with tremors, in pain, slowly, asymmetrically, beautifully. They perform what climate adaptation actually looks like in a body: adjustment, improvisation, the refusal to hold still in the shape someone else designed for you.
But here is the thing that connects their work to climate justice in a way that most analysis misses, the thing I keep returning to from inside my own sensory experience: their performances are also acoustic events. When a dancer using a wheelchair crosses a stage, the chair makes a sound. The weight shifts and the floor responds. A performer with a mobility aid creates a specific rhythmic signature. These sounds are usually mixed out, minimized, treated as noise rather than signal.
That erasure is the entire problem in miniature.
Climate adaptation planning treats disabled bodies as noise in the signal. Aberrations in the evacuation model. Exceptions that complicate the clean demographic projections. When emergency managers account for disability at all, they account for it as a logistical problem — how many accessible vehicles, how many ASL interpreters, how many backup generators for ventilators. The math of accommodation.
What they never account for is the knowledge those bodies carry. The somatic intelligence of a person who has spent decades navigating a world not built for them. The capacity to sense when systems are failing before the system announces it, because your survival has always depended on reading the room — literally, acoustically, spatially — faster than the room reads you.
What silence hides
I go to the community center pool at 5:45 AM most weekdays. Not to swim. To stand in the doorway for forty seconds before anyone arrives and listen to the water hear itself back off the tile walls. It is the most beautiful sound I know. Useless. Tells me nothing I need for survival. Pure sensory greed.
But the reason I mention it is this: that forty seconds of empty-pool acoustics is the sound of a space before it has been organized by human intention. Before the lane dividers go in, before the lifeguard’s whistle, before the schedule imposes its logic. The water moves according to its own physics. The room resonates at its natural frequency.
Climate disaster does the same thing to a city. It strips the human scheduling away and returns the space to its material reality. Concrete holds water. Wood floats. Glass shatters at specific wind speeds. And in that moment of raw physics, the body that has always navigated by material reality — by touch, by sound, by the way air moves around an obstacle — is not the body that needs saving.
It is the body that already knows.
The plan that does not exist
Mia Mingus wrote in 2010 about collective access as a practice, not a checklist — something built through relationship, not compliance. She was writing about a disability justice event in Detroit. She described access as something that had to be created together, in real time, responsive to the actual bodies in the room. Not mandated from above. Not standardized. Alive.
That is also the only climate adaptation model that has ever worked. The mutual aid networks after Maria. The community care pods during COVID. The neighbor who checks on the neighbor because the state will not.
Every disaster plan I have ever read in accessible format — and I have read more than I should admit — assumes that the crisis is the exception. That the normal state is one of functioning infrastructure, responsive institutions, bodies that cooperate with the evacuation route.
Disabled people know the crisis is the baseline. The infrastructure was already failing. The institution was already unresponsive. The route was already inaccessible. The flood just made it visible to everyone else.
In Yabucoa, the water eventually receded, and the room went back to being a room, and the recording ended, and the silence that followed was the silence of a space that had been unmade and would be rebuilt by someone who never heard what it sounded like when it was honest.
| *This article was inspired by [Disability Justice is Climate Justice | Sins Invalid](https://sinsinvalid.org/disability-justice-is-climate-justice/) from sinsinvalid.org.* |