When help from authorities falls short, disabled people often need to turn to their own networks, if they are fortunate enough to have them. On the island of Maui, as the fires tore through the historic town of Lahaina in August 2023 — ultimately leaving 102 people dead according to the U.S. Fire Administration — parents of children with disabilities shared their desperate plights on social media.
In a Facebook group for parents of children with disabilities, one mother shared the story of her 6-year-old son with down syndrome who relied on a feeding tube. After their home burned down, the mother no longer had the formula needed to feed him and replacements for the tube — now he risked dying of starvation.
Almost 3,000 miles away, Andrea Graham, a mother of eight children, some of which have disabilities like autism and down syndrome, read those posts seeking help. Graham runs Emma’s Exceptional Equipment Exchange in Washington state, a nonprofit that offers free medical equipment to people with disabilities. The Exchange is named for her daughter Emma, who died at 10 years old due to her severe cerebral palsy — she couldn’t move on her own, had frequent seizures and was given a terminal diagnosis at the age of five.
Determined to make a difference for medically vulnerable people in Lahaina, Graham gathered essential supplies — oxygen sensors, feeding tubes, wound care — and tried to send them to Maui.
But Graham encountered multiple hurdles — a pilot friend was not allowed to carry an extra bag of supplies on a flight, and her calls to the Red Cross went unanswered.
After Graham faced dead end after dead end, she received a late-night text instructing her to meet Pierce County Emergency Manager John Holdsworth south of Seattle the next morning with her medical supplies.
The next day, Graham drove to an unmarked building, passed two security checkpoints, and entered a parking lot filled with police, SWAT and emergency personnel. There, she told Holdsworth about the 6-year-old boy who needed the feeding tube to survive and gave him three boxes of medical supplies to take to Maui.
Graham says that Holdsworth was taken aback when he realized the boxes were for people with disabilities. She recalls his response: “We hadn’t even thought of them."
According to the Disability Statistics Center, around 200,000 people in Hawaii reported having a disability in 2023. Ivana Gadient’s 24-year-old daughter, Jewel, was one of them. She suffers from cerebral palsy, and when the fires blazed through Lahania, the two were recovering from COVID.
Despite being in a post-COVID “haze” Gadient recalls, the Maui local asked herself: “what can I do at home? What can I do with my computer? I have electricity, we're fine. How can we help?”
First, she started reposting GoFundMe campaigns, then she asked families to send her their donation items — that’s when her eldest daughter, Makena, a special education teacher, heard about Andrea Graham’s attempts to get medical supplies to Maui.
The two moms connected and the three boxes full of supplies were delivered directly to Gadient.
“I met some families in the parking lot at Costco. Just opened the back of my car and said, ‘take what you need,’” Gadient said. Together, Graham and Gadient, who’ve never met in person, distributed medical supplies to people with disabilities on Maui just four days after the fires broke out.
But Graham says it shouldn’t have to take someone like her, more than 2,700 miles away to help.
“There is a lot of red tape when it comes to natural disasters in general, but that red tape is miles high and miles wide when it comes to those with disabilities,” says Graham.
When parched brush caught fire and ignited the massive blaze in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January, it inspired both Graham and Gadient to reach out to parents of children with special needs to offer help. One of those moms was Kate Hamias, a business owner and Malibu local whose daughter has cerebral palsy.
