DISASTERSYour Politics, Age, and Gender Predict Your Disaster Readiness
Many Americans remain dangerously unprepared for floods, fires, and other natural catastrophes, but disaster-readiness might depend more on who you are than where you live.
Many Americans remain dangerously unprepared for floods, fires, and other natural catastrophes, and their level of readiness is strongly shaped by factors like age, gender, employment status, and past experience with disasters.
Climate-driven calamities are becoming more frequent and severe, as shown by last month’s devastating floods in Texas. Twenty-eight disasters nationwide caused $93 billion in damage in 2023 — a price tag the country has exceeded in the first half of 2025. Yet more than 70 percent of Americans lack a detailed safety plan.
A study published last month in Public Health Reports provides some insight into who those people are. Researchers surveyed nearly 3,000 adults in the United States and found that those who previously experienced a natural disaster were more likely to have emergency supplies and evacuation plans in place. Men and those with jobs more often said they were prepared, while women and unemployed people often were not. Importantly, adults over 55 were 63 percent more likely to say they knew how to stay safe and access emergency information.
That finding was striking in part because older adults often comprise the majority of victims when disasters hit, said Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “Older adults are saying they know what to do, they understand what to do. But then there’s an additional body of research on specific disaster events showing the older adults are actually, in many ways, the ones most at risk to death, injury and other forms of harm,” she said.
The study also found political affiliation plays a role in how someone might respond in a crisis, with Democrats expressing greater confidence in their ability to access emergency information. “This raises questions about whether this finding relates more to a lack of knowledge or to a lack of trust in information sources, and we encourage future research on this given its implications for messaging in disaster preparedness and response efforts,” said Christine Crudo Blackburn, the lead author of the study conducted by Texas A&M University.
