RAPID: Risk Area Residents' Response to Hurricane Harvey

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Evacuation is a critical component in a community's disaster preparedness plan. The challenge is that lives can be lost during evacuations too. Such loss of life is especially likely in a hurricane with a late-changing track striking a major urban area because household evacuation preparation often places many evacuees on the road at the same time. Despite the best transportation planning models, major traffic jams commonly occur in the surge zone. This research will improve our understanding of the time it takes for households to receive warnings, prepare to evacuate, and choose their evacuation routes and destinations. It will also expand our knowledge of the role of demographic and experiential characteristics of these households to predict warning reception, evacuation preparation, and route/destination choice. This project will advance the scientific understanding of household hurricane evacuations by conducting a survey of 800 randomly selected households in Corpus Christi Texas. This survey has six specific objectives: 1) collect data on hurricane warning dissemination times, 2) collect data on household evacuation preparation times, 3) collect data on household evacuation logistics (e.g., route choices, destination choices, evacuation durations, and evacuation costs), 4) assess the ability of demographic, experiential, and risk perception data to predict evacuation departure times and evacuation logistics, 5) collect data on risk area occupants' observations of graphic displays of hurricane tracks, hurricane impacts, and evacuation guidance, and 6) assess the ability of demographic, experiential, and graphic displays to predict risk perception, evacuation decisions, and evacuation departure times. Understanding how long it takes for individuals to decide to evacuate and to actually evacuate is a critical and poorly understood part of evacuation models.