A Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) earthquake will cause widespread damage along the Pacific Northwest (PNW) coast of the United States. It is, therefore, crucial to understand how to reduce future impacts across this region and assess current levels of household preparedness. Here, we examine whether decades of risk and preparedness campaigns have established protective knowledge and promoted hazard adjustments for residents of the Portland, Oregon metropolitan (PDX) region, an area where risk and preparedness campaigns have been increasing over the last decade. We also explore how PDX preparedness levels compare to those in other PNW regions using analogous data from multiple surveys over a 20-year time interval and assess PDX respondent’s perceptions of risk information sources. We find that 63% of PDX residents do not intend to “Drop, Cover, and Hold On” (DCHO) when earthquake shaking starts and that, although residents are generally aware of earthquake hazards in the area, they are less aware of the specific risks for their homes. Furthermore, PDX residents’ preparedness levels seem to be comparable to those recently surveyed in Washington, but somewhat less than those surveyed two decades ago in California, though more comprehensive data are needed to verify these results. We also find that people rate risk information provided by emergency managers and their websites as more accurate, understandable, relevant, and new than other sources. Our results suggest that significant gaps remain in translating broad awareness of the CSZ earthquake into personal knowledge and preparedness. This work provides guidance to PDX emergency educators for more targeted messaging and provides methods to measure preparedness variables in other regions for future comparisons. By paying close attention to preparedness gaps, local officials can use their limited resources more effectively to develop strategies to inform their communities and improve preparedness before a major earthquake strikes.
- Award ID(s):
- 1635593
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10426116
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Australasian journal of disaster and trauma studies
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1174-4707
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 67-82
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
-
more » « less
Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems are relatively new technologies having first emerged as regional systems in the 1990s. Japan was the first nation to develop and implement a nationwide system in October 2007, and in the United States, ShakeAlert®became available on the entire length of the US West Coast in May 2021. Assessing how EEW is perceived and utilized by alert recipients is considered essential. Such assessments are necessary to evaluate whether alert recipients are taking advantage of alert messages to initiate protective actions upon receipt of an alert, how they regard the usefulness of alerts, desirable thresholds for issuing alerts, and other aspects of these systems. Having information from users will also facilitate assessments of the success of earthquake preparedness educational programs such as the ShakeOut and whether annual drills which include information on EEW systems are resulting in behavioral response consistent with the content of these programs. Finally, information on EEW utilization will provide data useful to social scientists who study hazards to advance our understanding of behavioral response to warnings. Survey research in the aftermath of a significant earthquake in which an EEW has been issued is one obvious method of achieving these objectives and there already exist a number of survey instruments for this purpose. A related strategy and the goal of the present research is to develop a brief questionnaire, consistent with those already developed, as a supplement to the United States Geological Survey’s “Did You Feel It?” questionnaire that has provided earthquake intensities and information on behavioral response in earthquakes, both domestic and international, since 2004. Having the intensity level at each respondent’s location is essential for relating their perspectives and actions to the shaking they experienced.
-
more » « less
Abstract Timely communication of warnings is essential to protection of lives and properties during tornado outbreaks. Both official and personal channels of communication prove to have considerable impact on the overall outcome. In this study, an agent-based model is developed to simulate warning’s reception–dissemination process in which a person is exposed to, receives, and sends information while interacting with others. The model is applied to an EF5 tornado (EF indicates enhanced Fujita scale) that struck Moore, Oklahoma, in 2013. The parameters are calibrated using publicly available data or a poststorm telephone survey or were derived from literature reviews, expert judgement, and sensitivity analysis. The result shows a reasonable agreement between modeled and observed reception rates for older and younger adults and for different channels, with errors of less than 20 percentage points. Similar agreement is also seen for the average numbers of warning sources. The subsequent simulation indicates that, in the absence of tornado sirens, the overall reception rates for younger and older adults would drop from the baseline by 17 and 6 percentage points, respectively. Concurrently, there is a large decline in the number of warning sources. When a persons’ social network is enlarged, the reception rate for older adults improves from 77% to 80%, whereas for younger adults it stays unchanged. The impact of increased connectivity is more pronounced when people are not watching television or a tornado siren is not available.
Significance Statement Every year, tornadoes cause significant property damage and numerous casualties in the United States. This study aims to understand how tornado warnings reach the at-risk public through various communication channels. Using the agent-based model and simulation, we are able to reconstruct the dynamic patterns of warning’s reception–dissemination process for older and younger adults within a historical EF5 tornado. Further analysis confirms the importance of tornado sirens in not only alerting more residents about the dangerous weather condition but also prompting protective actions. In the meantime, an increase in social connectivity among residents would compensate for the lack of exposure to television and tornado siren. Future work should investigate the robustness of this model and its parameters when applied to other tornado outbreaks.
-
The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of families with young children as school closures and social distancing requirements left caregivers struggling to facilitate educational experiences, maintain social connections, and ensure financial stability. Considering families' increased reliance on technology to survive, this research documents parents' lived experiences adapting to technology's outsized role alongside other shifts in family life associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe a 10-week study with 30 enrolled families with children aged 3 to 13 in the United States using the asynchronous remote communities (ARC) methodology to 1) understand the benefits and challenges faced by families as they adapted technology at home to navigate the pandemic, and 2) to ideate improvements to those experiences through co-design. We found that amidst gaps in infrastructural support from schools, workplaces, and communities, parents experienced deep anxiety and took on new roles, including tech support, school administrator, and curator of meaningful activities for their children. As parents shared bold and creative technology-based solutions for improving family well-being, schooling experiences, social life, and beyond, they demonstrated their capacity to contribute to new models of learning and family life. Our findings are a call to action for CSCW researchers, designers, and family-focused practitioners to work with learning communities that incorporate parent, teacher, and technology experiences in their academic and community planning.more » « less
-
more » « less
Abstract Performance monitoring (PM) is central to learning and decision making. It allows individuals to swiftly detect deviations between actions and intentions, such as response errors, and adapt behavior accordingly. Previous research showed that in adult participants, error monitoring is associated with two distinct and robust behavioral effects. First, a systematic slowing down of reaction time speed is typically observed following error commission, which is known as post‐error slowing (PES). Second, response errors have been reported to be automatically evaluated as negative events in adults. However, it remains unclear whether (1) children process response errors as adults do (PES), (2) they also evaluate them as negative events, and (3) their responses vary according to the pedagogy experienced. To address these questions, we adapted a simple decision‐making task previously validated in adults to measure PES as well as the affective processing of response errors. We recruited 8‐ to 12‐year‐old children enrolled in traditional (
N = 56) or Montessori (N = 45) schools, and compared them to adults (N = 46) on the exact same task. Results showed that children processed correct actions as positive events, and that adults processed errors as negative events. By contrast, PES was similarly observed in all groups. Moreover, the former effect was observed in traditional schoolchildren, but not in Montessori schoolchildren. These findings suggest that unlike PES, which likely reflects an age‐invariant attention orienting toward response errors, their affective processing depends on both age and pedagogy.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
