Page 15 - NJ Cooperator Summer 2020

NJCOOPERATOR.COM THE NEW JERSEY COOPERATOR — SUMMER 2020 15 Your Association is in Good Hands with Homestead Management Services. Responsible Property Management that responds to your needs • Personal, responsive customer care with 24/7 emergency call service • Modern, fully intergrated databased network for quick response to problems and solutions • Live, expert staff of experienced management personel A complete financial package: • Complete Monthly Financial Statement •Accounts Payable • Accounts Receivable •Deliquency Report •Annual Reports www.homesteadmgmt.org Family owned with over 35 years years of experience 328 Changebridge Rd. Pinebrook, NJ 07058 973-797-1444 284 Rt. 206 South, Hillsborough, NJ 08844 908-874-6991 © AAMC ACCREDITED ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT COMPANY cept for emergencies. My recommendation is to do what you must and should do, and worry about the lawsuits later, as long as you have a bona fide legal opinion to sup- port your actions or inactions.” Perhaps Van Duyne says it best when considering our path forward. “Even in the short time we have been facing this crisis, I have seen a real upswing in people ‘losing it’ for a time”—whether that be bending (or breaking) rules they would ordinarily abide by, making unreasonable demands, or just operating on a very short fuse in general. “Our associations are faced with walking a line between enforcing their governing documents and showing compassion for understandable failures to abide by the rules.” Overall, the pros advise everyone to keep in mind that this crisis will eventu- ally pass—and when it does, we will still be neighbors, so as abnormal and disorienting as this situation is, we should still strive to maintain our sense of community, coop- eration, and compassion. n A.J. Sidransky is a staff writer/reporter for The New Jersey Cooperator, and a published novelist. abilities. Each of these categories represents a different challenge when it comes to man- aging emergency situations. Mobility “Folks with mobility disabilities use one or more devices — things like canes, crutches, manually-operated wheelchairs, scooters — whatever they need to maneu- ver through their environment,” Fraser ex- plains. Anyone who has difficulty walking — or indeed, is even extremely uncoordi- nated — is considered disabled in this way for our purposes. “A mobility disability can be an issue with any part of a body. Maybe you can’t open doors, or you can’t go down stairs, you can’t press keypads, whatever that might be.” An important consideration here is that not all mobility issues are obvious to the eye. Fraser himself mentions this when he gives lectures on the subject. “I played hockey in high school and college and have had operations on both knees,” he says. “So if I had to run down 10 or 12 flights of stairs in a hotel, I couldn’t run. It might take me too long — and you can’t see that. I also happen to be Type II diabetic as I’ve gotten older, and what else you can’t see is I had heart surgery in 2007 and I’ve got two stents in my heart.” In his case — and there are many, many more like him — someone who looks perfectly able to walk down 70 flights of stairs may have extreme difficulty doing so. Vision “When you get into blindness or low vi- sion, that includes people with partial or VULNERABLE... continued from page 1 total vision loss,” Fraser says. “Some people with this disability can distinguish light and dark, sharply contrasting colors, and very large print, but can’t read small print and have trouble negotiating dimly lit spac- es, or tolerating hard glare.” “Many people who are blind depend on their sense of touch and their sense of hear- ing to perceive their environment, what’s around them,” Fraser continues. “There’s a risk that a person with a visual impair- ment could miss a visual cue such as a new obstruction that occurred during the event that could affect egress, so if something falls off a wall of a building or gets moved because of an earthquake, they’re not going to see it.” Less dramatically, there’s also the pos- sibility that a visually challenged resident will not be able to read certain handouts. “If you’re handing out information, it needs to be in multiple formats. So you can’t hand someone an 8 ½” x 11” piece of paper with 12-point font on it and say, ‘Well, now, I gave this to all the residents.’ It needs to be available in large print, and probably in Braille.” Hearing This category includes the deaf, and also those with partial hearing. The latter often use a combination of lip-reading and hear- ing aids to understand spoken communica- tion; both of these are often disrupted dur- ing emergencies. “If you’ve got fire alarms going off, you’ve got sirens going off, it can seriously affect whatever hearing they have,” Fraser says. “People who are deaf or hard of hear- ing must rely on reading for information, and must be able to clearly see the face of the person who’s speaking if they’re lip- reading. Those who use sign language— and, by the way, American Sign Language is the third most common language in this country, behind English and Spanish!—so people who are hard of hearing or deaf may have difficulty understanding oral com- munication or receiving notifications by equipment that is exclusively auditory, such as telephones, fire alarms, or public distress systems.” Let’s say the building is being evacu- ated because of an earthquake. If the super gestures to his left and says, “Don’t go that way,” how will this be interpreted by a deaf person? “People who are more visual than they are auditory, that’s the way they’re like- ly going to go, even though I said don’t go that way,” Fraser says. The messages have to be phrased to avoid negatives. Speech and Cognitive Impairments Obviously, a speech disability would not hamper a person’s ability to shimmy out a fire escape, or quickly descend ten flights of stairs. But a speech impairment is still rel- evant to this discussion. “One example that’s very clear is tele- phones in an elevator,” Fraser says. “Say the elevator gets jammed, the person gets stuck, they pick up that phone and can’t tell continued on page 16