I got out of bed hoping something was going to be different when I looked at the scenarios for Hurricane Florence. Unfortunately, nothing has changed. The storm, at the time of writing, is a major hurricane (category 4) and is still on track to make landfall this week in North Carolina. Models also suggest that it may stall and cause a flood disaster. Evacuation orders have been given for over 1 million people in the coastal Carolinas and parts of Virginia. It is very unusual to have a storm this strong at the latitude of North Carolina, and a category 5 storm has never made landfall in the state. This is a dangerous storm but many people won't leave.
I have always been intrigued with how people use "personal experience meters" in weather decision-making processes. The challenge with this very natural approach is that it is often difficult to internal or conceptualize something that you have not experienced. After Harvey, many people in Houston said, "we get rain and flooding all of the time. I never expected it to be this bad." Miriam-Webster dictionary defines the word anomaly this way:
Anomaly: something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified
Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Florence are "anomaly" events, which means you probably have not experienced anything like them before. I reached out to my colleague Dr. Sarah DeYoung in the School of Public Health at the University of Georgia. DeYoung, a professor of Health Policy & Management and affiliate of the Institute for Disaster Management, is a leading expert on hurricane evacuation decision-making and social perspectives on disasters.
Dr. Shepherd: What factors influence people's decision to leave or not?
Dr. DeYoung: Factors that influence decision-making....Data from my past work show that people fear wind more than water. But people need to be checking the rainfall forecast for inland flooding instead of focusing too much on wind-speed.
This is something that I have also noticed. I also think the way extreme wind events (tornadoes and hurricanes) contributes to this challenge. When is the last time you saw your local news station cut into the football game for a flood? Studies have always shown that "water" (surge and inland freshwater flooding) is the deadliest aspect of a hurricane. Yet, the Saffir-Simpson scale and much of the hurricane charter centers around wind speed.
Dr. Shepherd: What is the optimal time to leave?
Dr. DeYoung: With Florence, the optimal time to leave is TODAY (Tuesday September 11th). People will all be trying to be leave at the same time according to what is "early" in their mind. Kind of like when your team is losing everyone starts to leave the stadium a bit early to beat traffic......People need to leave as soon as they safely can do so and not wait until Thursday to try to leave The main reason being traffic. Being in the car with small kids for hours and hours, can obviously, be stressful for everyone. Confirmed also with my research, gridlock traffic also is dangerous for those who wait until the last minute because of actual deterioration of weather and flooded roads.
Her point here is very important. The "wait and see" mentality can be very dangerous, but studies show that people are terrible at assessing risk. Weather information has enough information to make decisions in advance. The track forecasts by the National Hurricane Center have been pretty spot on for Florence for several days now. "Hope" and "Maybe" are not responsible plans for dealing with extreme weather events. During Hurricane Irma, traffic jams and gas availability were an issue. Richard Olson was the director of the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University. He told NPR,
Pretty much everybody who wanted to get out, got out.....Although I've heard anywhere from 20 to 30 hours not being uncommon at all.
Dr. Shepherd: How can we overcome challenges associated with the decision-making process?
Dr. DeYoung: To improve evacuation compliance (I know you asked decision-making, but compliance is super important) people need to realize that this event could be unlike anything they have seen in their lifetime. Past evacuees I've interviewed made decisions based on "well, it never got this bad here before" and then they had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. Another challenge is that people might be confused by thinking this is a "coastal event" but really it will be statewide. No one has talked about tornadoes spawning off, but in Hugo, that is what almost killed my family (we lived in a trailer) and that was in Catawba County NC, far far far west.
Bingo. I tend to be from the "better safe than sorry" school of thought. When I assess the risk that me or my family may face the prospect of a life-threatening situation, I am willing to be inconvenienced even if nothing eventually happens. It is very common for people to complain about having to evacuate then the storm changed course.
The other facet of this story is vulnerability. I have the adaptive capacity or resilience (the means and resources) to gas up the car or get a hotel in another state. However, this is not a reality for many people in the path of a hurricane. Dr. Jennifer Horney is an a professor of epidemiology at University of Delaware. She wrote in The Conversation in 2016,
While the evacuation of New Orleans for Katrina was widely viewed as a debacle, it actually succeeded on many counts. According to the National Academy of Engineering, more people were able to leave the city in a shorter time than was even thought possible. However, many who couldn’t move were triply vulnerable: they had low incomes or lacked transportation, lived in older homes in flood-prone neighborhoods and had little access to or influence on the development or implementation of local disaster plans and policies. We need to do more work to translate bad experiences like this into policies that can protect residents’ health and safety, while also respecting inherent community strengths that sometimes lead to evacuation failures.
