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ABSTRACT Objective: This study investigated how the effectiveness of household emergency plans during tornadoes was associated with family discussions, and the attributes of the plan for different age groups. Methods: A telephone survey was conducted in 2014, one year after two 2013 Enhanced Fujita 4/5 tornadoes. The working sample included 223 respondents who reported having a household emergency plan before the tornadoes. The latent class analysis was used to identify the patterns of the plans and develop a typology based on their content. Logistic regression was used to examine predictors for plan effectiveness. Results: Two classes of plans were identified: quality plans that were rich in content and limited plans that had lower levels of content richness. Older adults were less likely to have quality plans and less likely to have family discussions. Quality of the plan and discussions with family members increased plan effectiveness among older adults, but not younger adults. Conclusions: Better emergency planning could be more important for older than for younger adults. The findings were discussed from a gerontological perspective that focuses on older adults’ unique needs, vulnerabilities, and resilience factors. 

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 StatementEvery 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.