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Late October 2012 Sandy makes landfall in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.
We watched the water just rise, come up the street and it got higher and higher
and higher and at that point it was seven o'clock 7:15. I was stunned how fast it all happened.
it's at the curb. It's at the grass. It's at the front door. it's coming in the front door.
I walked out to the curb and I was at about chest-high water. Despite storm surge
warnings and evacuation orders issued days before landfall, 117 deaths have
been attributed to Hurricane Sandy. Why didn't people leave? Why was there such a
failure to communicate risk to residents? How could we do better to prevent such a
catastrophe? The Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey Sea Grant programs with NOAA
National Sea Grant asked social scientists why as part of the Coastal Storm
Awareness Program. Their answers were drawn from 10 competitively selected
research projects funded through the disaster relief Appropriations Act of
2013. 40 deaths were by drowning, nearly half of which occurred in flooded homes.
Interviews conducted by State University of New York researchers showed that
people's previous experience with Tropical Storm Irene influenced their
reaction of some people to warnings about Sandy.
Researchers from Hofstra University found that while only a third of Long
Beach New York coastal residents left their homes prior to Sandy the resulting
damage forced ninety percent of them to evacuate after the storm.
the Coastal Storm Awareness Program was based on three framing questions.
Question one: How were storm warning reports obtained? Who was communicating them and
who is listening to which sources? As expected, people used a broad spectrum of
media platforms to keep updated on Sandy storm warnings and information.
The study found that emergency briefings issued by the National Weather Service
can be a very effective tool for motivating residents to take action
during coastal flood events. The briefings allow forecasters to
prioritize information and categorize risks and give clear direct action
statements to residents to help them in their decision-making. Another reason for
using as many different forms of communication as possible is that
primary sources of information change during the storm. According to results
from Mississippi State researchers about seventy percent of those who changed
information sources during Hurricane Sandy said they did so because they lost
power
Reliance on TV decreased during the storm, while radio use in face-to-face
conversations increased. 33% lost cell phone service while 66% lost TV service
but reliance on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter was also
fairly strong and likely to continue to increase in the future. Storms generate a
lot of conversation. Twitter captured nearly 14 million tweets over a
seventeen-day period before during and after
Sandy. These messages were analyzed by researchers who coded them by keywords
related to weather. They looked at the interconnectivity of Twitter users in
the influence of prominent users in the network This includes New York City then
Mayor Bloomberg, New Jersey Governor Christie and New Jersey Senator Cory
Booker formerly mayor of Newark, as well as FEMA and NOAA. Twitter uses most
frequently tweeted storm damage, photos, as well as personal experiences and
storm information. Using all of these communication platforms to issue
consistent storm warnings increases the likelihood that people in affected areas
can access critical information. It was very difficult to find out what was really going on.
We had no cell phone service and no news footage, nothing. It was like a war had come
through overnight. Question Two: the second framing question of these
projects was: What primary factors influence decisions to follow or ignore
storm warnings? How was the information processed and who or what plays a role
in subsequent action or inaction? People seem to trust different sources of storm
information as the results were mixed in terms of which sources were mentioned
most frequently. People recognize the National Weather Service as the
authoritative source of weather information but expected and preferred
to receive this information from more local sources. Researchers at Yale
conducted a human segmentation analysis of Connecticut coastal residents that
grouped people into five categories based on risk perception and other factors. We
also identified five groups based on their attitudes towards hurricanes. The
First Out are people who understand the risks and say they were willing to leave
for hurricane of any strength. They think it's safer to go. Next
the Constrained, who understand the risks of hurricanes but they face significant
barriers to leaving if they need to so they have health or disability issues
for themselves and their family or they have pets, or they lack
transportation. Third, these folks are not expecting a hurricane of any strength in
the next 50 years, so they are the least prepared of all the groups but they say
that if one did occur that they would evacuate-- and yet if they need to
evacuate they face many barriers even more so than the constrained. Fourth are the
Reluctant who do not want to go. They feel safe at home but they say that if
they're ordered to go by local police or a local government
official then they will leave. They don't perceive many barriers to leaving
if they need to go and finally the Diehards, who feel safe at home. They do
not intend to evacuate. They don't want to evacuate. They are confident that they
can keep themselves and their family safe and in fact they feel that it's
riskier to leave and to stay at home because they're worried about their
property. They're not thinking about their own lives. If we're going to have
messages coming from traditional authority figures it might be important
for them to talk about the actions that they're taking such as evacuating their
own families are going door-to-door more than just repeating over and over again
that there is a mandatory evacuation we did this project by interviewing local
emergency managers and finding out what their needs were for communicating with
the public about coastal storm risk we then did a survey testing various
messages with the public to find out if certain messages were more effective at
getting people to evacuate or take repair tutorial measures in contrast
researchers at Cornell Mississippi State and Hofstra determine that family
friends or neighbors local TV news or the Weather Channel played major roles
in influencing evacuation decisions; moreso than government agencies or officials.
In our study of Hurricane Sandy victims and what they were paying attention to
prior to their decision we found that often people listen to their friends and
family more than they might listen to traditional authority figures. Another
important factor involved the format of the warnings. The word "voluntary" used in
combination with evacuation orders was determined to be completely ineffective
by researchers at both Rutgers and Cornell. We compared different type of
evacuation wording, mandatory evacuation, voluntary evacuation and other wording
and like many of the other groups that were funded through the CSAP program we
found that using voluntary as a descriptor of an evacuation is result in
very low levels of evacuation such Using "mandatory" seems to results in
the highest but there are some other words that can be used in between there
such as evacuation advisory or just evacuation recommendation that seem to
result in higher levels of evacuation attention than using the word voluntary. We
found out that having it mandatory evacuation order is the simplest way and
the most effective way of communicating risk.
Yale researchers found that only 21% of coastal residents living in evacuation
zone A and raising the category 2 hurricane would evacuate without an
official notice. About six in 10, 58% percent said they would evacuate if an
official advised them to. Evacuation orders for flood warnings for certain
areas are meaningless if people don't know where they live
relative to the scope of those orders or warnings. Some may leave but don't really
need to, while others who clearly need to leave may not. And do people actually
know where those evacuations signs lead? We found a couple of surprising things.
First is that 74% of coastal residents have never seen an evacuation map so if
they need to get out they don't necessarily know the best route also
seventy percent of residents either don't know or believe that they do not
live in an evacuation zone and we only included people in the survey who lived
in the evacuation zone so they do. In 2013 New York City revised its hurricane
evacuation zones and initiated a Know Your Zone campaign to help familiarize
residents with these changes with maps like the one shown.
Terminology used in storm warnings plays an important role in determining whether
the risk can be understood by the general population. Columbia researchers
found that few people had any concept of what the term "storm surge" meant. Some
envisioned a tsunami.
The simplest way to explain storm surge is that the winds in a hurricane or any
big storm are typically quite strong and they're pushing on the ocean and they
push the ocean towards the land, the water hits the land. It's got nowhere to go but
inland and it floods areas which are dry. Well we've gotten better at
communicating the depth or height of the water so 5 feet, 6 feet, 7 feet, how far inland
water can go we're still struggling with is to convey the force of the water. A lot
of people think that the water is coming up, you know, gentle and maybe touch their
doorstep and then go back down and it's gonna be okay; you can ride it out. But the force of
storm surge is actually quite strong. You have waves actually quite large waves
riding on top of the storm surge in the pounding and pounding and pounding the
structure until the structure either falls or collapses or is knocked off the
foundation. A third factor, previous experience with coastal storms, also had
a strong influence on how people reacted to storm warnings for Sandy. Columbia
researchers found that while the most important factor in a decision to
evacuate during
Sandy was the family's personal safety. The most important factor in the decision
not to evacuate was previous experience. The main focus there was to understand
decision-making practices in terms of disaster preparedness as well as
evacuation and specifically the role of the adolescent in times of
disaster in decision-making. And what we found is that depending on the family
structure --single-parent families for example --included the adolescent's voice
more in the decision-making and disaster preparedness. Based on Cornell research
previous experience also hinders or colors a person's ability to
conceptualize just how bad a storm can be. People can only imagine the worst
storm they have ever experienced. The second thing that I would like people to
remember is "nothing about us without us". it's a slogan in the disability rights
community and it reinforces the idea that there is no difference between
disability rights and civil rights. We all have the right to live; we all have
the right to be evacuated, and have one and all value our existence. Most typical
answers we heard was that they had nowhere else to do we also spoke to many
people who weren't able to get good information; who didn't find it
accessible or who were simply afraid of what would happen if they left their
home place or if they took refuge in a shelter. People are also reluctant to
leave their pets behind and more communities are beginning to address the
need for pet friendly shelters.
FEMA, states and communities are working to require homes in vulnerable coastal
areas to be flood compliant. One interesting question that arose from the
studies conducted by Cornell, Yale, and Hofstra is, what effect will FEMA, state and
local requirements that homes in vulnerable coastal areas be flood-compliant have on
future evacuation behavior? One of the more interesting preliminary findings
coming out of our research has to do with possibly the conflict between the
evacuation information that we're trying to get to people and their perception of
the safety of their houses.
and this would relate for example to all of the efforts to raise houses to make
them more storm compliant and so what we're learning is that if we ask people
in a survey they seem to say that if their house is safe they will evacuate but we also
learned in the focus groups exactly the opposite that people that said that
their houses were safe where they thought that they were safer we're less
likely to evacuate because they felt safe in their house.
Most individuals see that that risk of high-impact storm events is increasing;
They see the consequences as dire; however, they still expressed a strong commitment
to staying in that community. One heartening finding is that a lot of
people feel individually responsible for preparing for those risks however they
don't have a great idea how to prepare for long-term risk. The last framing
question focused on improvements to future warnings to make them more
actionable and effective.
How can the content or delivery of future warnings be improved to increase
understanding and compliance? Nurture Nature Center researchers developed some
recommendations for improving the verbal and graphic clarity of these materials.
Keep the briefings short and include clear direct summaries. Deliver the most
critical action oriented information up front. Move storm details more to the
back.
Use color, different font sizes, bolding and underlining to emphasize important
information. They also determined that emergency managers and local officials
start paying close attention to the warnings six to seven days out and
residents for 4 to 5 days out. The research team also looked at a number of graphics
generated by the National Weather Service including this wind speed
direction map. Their suggested revisions to improve readability and to
make it more understandable to more audience include adding a more detailed
legend that explains the wind barbs and flags; calling out key community names
in white, and enlarging the font size for wind speeds in miles per hour.
Sometimes they put collars on the stop signs that say "You are in a storm surge zone" or
or "This is how high the water could go". I think we need to continue to reinforce those
visual representations of how far inland water can go and how high it can get.
Researchers at Hofstra worked with some of the Latino community in Long Beach New
York and ultimately new messages issued from that city will be in several
languages. Long Beach Latino Civic Association understood that information was getting out to communities as
English-only and we recognize the fact that this was something that had to change,
especially due to the fact that we have hurricane announcements and it was necessary for those who do not speak the language
to also know what was happening. We persuaded and helped and worked with the city council thereby legislation around language
to thereby enact legislation directed at language access. We are trying to create a web application that allows for
bidirectional communication between emergency managers in weather-related
emergencies and the general public.
Our goal is to be able to capture the images that are shared by people via
Twitter and Instagram and serve those images up to emergency managers who can
then dispatch those images for the correct response during a
weather-related emergency. Our Coastal Storm Awareness Program, CSAP,
explored the human dimensions of the coastal storm preparedness,
planning, and response issue.
This is an issue that people on the greater New York metropolitan area have had to deal with
for a long time. Sandy has brought it to the forefront and the purpose of this
research program was to develop their understanding about certain questions
that dictate how effectively coastal
storm warnings affect and produce the kind of good decisions on the part of
citizens in the path of the storm that we would like to see. So we worked with
the New Jersey and Connecticut Sea Grant programs, the National Sea Grant office
and professionals in the weather community, weather forecasting community,
and the emergency response community to answer or to address three major
questions, the first being how do people these days
get their information about coastal storms and warnings about coastal storms?
Secondly with this information in hand what decision factors do they use? What
is in their minds when they decide to heed a warning or not? We now know that those
factors vary between communities because of cultural, economic, social and ethnic
differences between communities.
Thirdly, and building on those first two, how can we make storm warnings in the future
better? -that produce more actionable information, give people a better sense of what the
storm is really gonna be like, and what threats are really posed to them
when it finally arrives. CSAP has been a successful research program. We've produced
lots of good information. That information is now being put in the
hands of these emergency management and weather forecasting professionals to
hopefully improve their ability to get the word out in timely and effective
fashion in advance of the next coastal storm. The storms will not go away they
are likely to increase and become perhaps even more severe on average with
global warming. So CSAP has not written the final chapter in this important
issue. We have made ia beginning. Perhaps we
sketched out the table of contents for that book. Our fundamental purpose is to
do research and to put the research results that we get in the hands of people who need it so that
they are better able to predict the answer to the question which coastal
residents in this region will inevitably face
and that question is-- what are you going to do when the warning comes?
(music) What cha gonna do when the warning comes? Are you gonna go? Do you have a plan?
Who you gonna listen to? Whatcha Whatcha gonna do when the warning comes? Where you gonna go? Whatcha gonna take? Who you gonna leave behind?
Prepare to stay safely, but leave if you
Prepare to stay safely, but leave if you Prepare to stay safely, but leave if you have to, Live in a flood zone? are you safer from home if storm surge is extreme - Do you know what that means? Will someone you love
be swept away? Whatcha gonna do when the warning comes? Are you gonna go? Do you have a plan? Who ya gonna listen to?
Whatcha gonna do when the morning comes? Take a look around. Hope that you have found everyone is safe and sound.
Safe and sound. Nothing about us without us. Ask yourself. Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? It's up to you.