Your Politics, Age, and Gender Predict Your Disaster Readiness
People who have experienced a disaster were more than three times as likely to have an evacuation plan, and more than twice as likely to have an emergency kit. That preparedness might not extend to those who narrowly avoid being hit by, say, a hurricane, said Jennifer Horney, a disaster epidemiologist at the University of Delaware. She calls this the false expectations paradox: If someone is told to evacuate, and then the hurricane doesn’t come, they’re more likely to ignore official warnings next time.
“There’s been a good bit of research on people trusting messages from friends and family over authorities,” she said. “So in terms of making an evacuation decision, people will end up doing what their friends and neighbors are doing,” Horney said. During Hurricane Harvey, people trusted their neighborhood Facebook groups — but didn’t necessarily heed government warnings, she said.
Blackburn’s findings raise urgent questions about how local authorities, public health officials, and federal agencies can more effectively communicate and build trust, particularly among populations that are less likely to prepare. Individual readiness only goes so far without governmental or agency intervention. “These intense storms require agency and organizational and governmental preparedness,” Horney said. “It’s not just one person or one family.”
The challenge is, the agencies doing that work tend to be underfunded, with high turnover, said Samantha Montano, an associate professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Her book Disasterology chronicles the nation’s inadequate preparation for climate disasters. “Most local emergency management agencies, if they’re doing preparedness, are doing things like posting information about how to make an emergency kit on their website. Maybe they’re handing out flyers or pamphlets at a local farmer’s market. If you’re lucky, they’re partnered with the local schools and send something home in the mail with the kids.”
Still, local emergency managers understand they aren’t reaching everyone, said David Abramson, who studies disaster response at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. “They know that they’ve got to figure out ways to reach people, and I think in the past, the answer has been using their networks of community based providers to reach out to particularly vulnerable groups and populations,” he said.
One way they might bridge the political divide is by enlisting local Republican Party officials to assist in reaching their own community, he said. Such thinking, and data from studies like the one Blackburn led, can lead to other effective solutions — like working on disaster preparedness in schools, or engaging other community groups.
“My hope is that our data can be useful to the people on the ground who are helping communities and individuals prepare for disasters,” said Blackburn. “By understanding how individuals prepare, we can actually tailor policies to the needs of people.”
Sophie Hurwitz is Climate Solutions Fellow at Grist. This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.
