The decisions of whether and how to evacuate during a climate disaster are influenced by a wide range of factors, including emergency messaging, social influences, and sociodemographics. Further complexity is introduced when multiple hazards occur simultaneously, such as a flood evacuation taking place amid a viral pandemic that requires physical distancing. Such multihazard events can necessitate a nuanced navigation of competing decision-making strategies wherein a desire to follow peers is weighed against contagion risks. To better understand these trade-offs, we distributed an online survey during a COVID-19 pandemic surge in July 2020 to 600 individuals in three midwestern and three southern states in the United States with high risk of flooding. In this paper, we estimate a random parameter discrete choice model in both preference space and willingness-to-pay space. The results of our model show that the directionality and magnitude of the influence of peers’ choices of whether and how to evacuate vary widely across respondents. Overall, the decision of whether to evacuate is positively impacted by peer behavior, while the decision of how to evacuate (i.e., ride-type selection) is negatively impacted by peer influence. Furthermore, an increase in flood threat level lessens the magnitude of peer impacts. In terms of the COVID-19 pandemic impacts, respondents who perceive it to be a major health risk are more reluctant to evacuate, but this effect is mitigated by increased flood threat level. These findings have important implications for the design of tailored emergency messaging strategies and the role of shared rides in multihazard evacuations. Specifically, emphasizing or deemphasizing the severity of each threat in a multihazard scenario may assist in: (1) encouraging a reprioritization of competing risk perceptions; and (2) magnifying or neutralizing the impacts of social influence, thereby (3) nudging evacuation decision-making toward a desired outcome.
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Characterizing Social Community Structures in Emergency Shelter Planning
During emergencies, it is often necessary to evacuate vulnerable people to safer places to reduce loss of lives and cope with human suffering. Shelters are publically available places to evacuate, especially for people who do not have any other choices. This paper overviews emergency shelter planning in disaster mitigation and preparation and discusses the need for better responding to people who need to evacuate during emergencies. Recent evacuation studies pay attention to integrating social factors into evacuation modeling for better prediction of evacuation decisions. Our goal is to address the impact of social behavior on the sheltering choices of evacuees and to explore the potential contributions of including social network characteristics in the decision-making process of authorities. We present the shelter utilization problem in South Carolina during Hurricane Florence and discuss an agent-based modeling approach that considers social community structures in modeling the shelter choice behavior of socially connected individuals
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735139
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10170364
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management - ISCRAM 2020
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 228-236
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Hurricane Irma, in 2017, made an unusual landfall in South Florida and the unpredictability of the hurricane’s path challenged the evacuation process seriously and left many evacuees clueless. It was likely to hit Southeast Florida but suddenly shifted its path to the west coast of the peninsula, where the evacuation process had to change immediately without any time for individual decision-making. As such, this study aimed to develop a methodology to integrate evacuation and storm surge modeling with a case study analysis of Irma hitting Southeast Florida. For this purpose, a coupled storm surge and wave finite element model (ADCIRC+SWAN) was used to determine the inundation zones and roadways with higher inundation risk in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties in Southeast Florida. This was fed into the evacuation modeling to estimate the regional clearance times and shelter availability in the selected counties. Findings show that it takes approximately three days to safely evacuate the populations in the study area. Modeling such integrated simulations before the hurricane hit the state could provide the information people in hurricane-prone areas need to decide to evacuate or not before the mandatory evacuation order is given.more » « less
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