Earthquake: The Road To Recovery : Red Cross Urged to Improve Help for Disabled : Relief: The agency is criticized for lacking accommodations at disaster shelters. Officials acknowledge some shortcomings.

A man in a wheelchair sat in a Canyon Country shelter for a week without a bath because he could not reach the shower on his own.

An American Red Cross shelter in Granada Hills denied help to a hearing-impaired man because a volunteer could not understand sign language.

A homeless blind man was not allowed into a Santa Monica shelter because he wanted to bring along his guide dog.

With similar reports multiplying in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, local advocates for the disabled have called on the American Red Cross to develop a national plan to better help people with disabilities during disasters.

“We have had so many things happen that you cannot believe,” said Norma Vescovo, director of the Independent Living Center of Southern California. “It’s just unacceptable.”

More than 49 million Americans have some form of disability. Complaints about lack of services date at least from Hurricane Andrew.

“There’s a lot of anger here toward the Red Cross,” said Pat Erwin, director of Metro-Dade County’s Disability Services, who helped people with disabilities during Hurricane Andrew. “(Red Cross President) Elizabeth Dole has to say, ‘We recognize these problems and are going to do something about it.’ ”

Most complaints from the earthquake relief effort center on untrained volunteers, inaccessible bathrooms and lack of services, such as telephone devices for the deaf and sign-language interpreters.

Advocates for the disabled contend that the lack of services violates the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which ensures that people with disabilities be granted the same access and services as others.

“You need to have provisions thought out in advance,” said Cynthia Lundie, a spokeswoman with the Westside Independent Living Center. “What does a blind person need? What does a hearing-impaired person need? What does a person in a wheelchair need?”

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Although there is no disaster plan designed specifically for the disabled that reaches all volunteers, Red Cross leaders believe they are complying with the law.

“We are sensitive to these needs and we are working hard to increase our ability to meet those needs,” said Jane Morgan, assistant director for operations of the Northridge earthquake relief effort.

“We’re working on a checklist that the shelter manager can use, and a card for the volunteer that outlines the things they can and cannot do for the physically challenged,” added Walt Mikols, national Red Cross manager of training, development and delivery for Disaster Services.

Morgan said the shelters are first scouted for accessibility. If there are no facilities designed for the disabled--bathrooms, phones, showers--the Red Cross policy is to attempt to provide the service or put the person in a motel or nursing home.

The Red Cross is a nonprofit agency funded entirely by the United Way and independent donations. Its budget was $394.7 million in 1992 and $535.6 million in 1993, according to Giselle McAuliffe, a Red Cross spokeswoman.

Red Cross staff and chapter leaders are trained to serve people with disabilities, and the agency also provides two handbooks designed to educate their chapter leaders, Morgan said. But critics say such information rarely reaches the volunteer.

Of the more than 13,000 Red Cross volunteers and staff who worked on the earthquake relief effort, almost three-fourths had not been trained on how to accommodate a disabled person, said Nancy Smith, family services director for the Red Cross.

Walk-in volunteers only are required to participate in a discussion on how to be sensitive to minorities and people with disabilities, Smith said.

“We have a lot of uninformed volunteers,” said Noreen Violetta, public affairs officer for the Santa Monica chapter of the Red Cross. “That happens when you have so many volunteers.”

In some cases, the training need not be much. Edward J. Gantt just needed a shower.

Forced into a Red Cross shelter at Canyon High School after his mobile home was battered by the temblor, Gantt spent a week without bathing because there were no facilities in which he could privately take his wheelchair into a shower. He has been paralyzed since birth.

“Being disabled, I would prefer a facility where I could just bathe in a wheelchair, where I could bathe without endangering myself. But they didn’t have that,” Gantt said. “It felt frustrating. I don’t like being dirty for one day.”

Vescovo’s agency ended up sending a social worker to pick Gantt up and drive him to a municipal swimming pool, where he bathed in the men’s showers.

Vescovo said that at a Granada Hills Red Cross shelter a hearing-impaired man could not understand a medical question and mistakenly noted that he had tuberculosis. The man had tuberculosis in the past, but no longer.

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Unable to communicate this to a shelter volunteer because there was no sign-language interpreter, the man was turned away from the shelter for fear he would give TB to others.

Another hearing-impaired person who tried to assist the man also was turned away because she was assumed to have TB as well, Vescovo said.

“Here again you have a lot of very well-meaning Red Cross workers, but they are not trained to work with disabled people,” Vescovo said.

Steven Hazzard believes that explains why he and his guide dog Starsky were rejected from the Red Cross shelter at Santa Monica College on the day of the quake. His Los Angeles apartment has since been condemned.

“In a disaster, they didn’t do me very much good,” the 41-year-old Hazzard said of Red Cross workers. He said he was told over the phone that guide dogs were not accepted at the shelter. He and Starsky spent the night in the garage of a sympathetic neighbor.

“I’m concerned about this,” Mikols said. “Whatever it takes, we’re going to do that. We’re committed to the physically challenged.”