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Understanding human movements in the face of natural disasters is critical for disaster evacuation planning, management, and relief. Despite the clear need for such work, these studies are rare in the literature due to the lack of available data measuring spatiotemporal mobility patterns during actual disasters. This study explores the spatiotemporal patterns of evacuation travels by leveraging users’ location information from millions of tweets posted in the hours prior and concurrent to Hurricane Matthew. Our analysis yields several practical insights, including the following: (1) We identified trajectories of Twitter users moving out of evacuation zones once the evacuation was ordered and then returning home after the hurricane passed. (2) Evacuation zone residents produced an unusually large number of tweets outside evacuation zones during the evacuation order period. (3) It took several days for the evacuees in both South Carolina and Georgia to leave their residential areas after the mandatory evacuation was ordered, but Georgia residents typically took more time to return home. (4) Evacuees are more likely to choose larger cities farther away as their destinations for safety instead of nearby small cities. (5) Human movements during the evacuation follow a log-normal distribution.
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Is it time to move away? How hurricanes affect future plans
Using surveys and interviews in the aftermath of Hurricanes Matthew and Irma, we investigated people's reasons for living on the coast of Georgia, their expectations for the future, and their intentions to stay in place or migrate away from the coast. We found that age, income, and ethnicity all play small but significant roles in determining intention to migrate, but that more intangible elements such as changes in quality of life or lifestyle may be more important. Many residents indicated a preference for remaining close if they were to permanently leave their homes, and residents were more likely to indicate a preference for staying in place after Irma than after Matthew. Residents may have many reasons for becoming more reluctant to move – complacency borne out of repeated “near misses”, increased awareness of the likely costs and inconvenience of re-location, or the realization that specific impacts are highly variable—making responses by coastal planners and managers more challenging.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1719532
- PAR ID:
- 10169540
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International journal of mass emergencies and disasters
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0280-7270
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 54-76
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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