Understanding disaster warning responses

Drabek, Thomas E.

doi:10.1016/s0362-3319(99)00021-x

Cited by 167 publications

(113 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In their analysis of media coverage of the 2011 Brisbane flood, Bohensky and Leitch [46] found that the community had placed expectations for preparedness and even prevention of floods on government. Drabek [47] noted that people will minimise the risk in their minds if disaster information is not specific enough, an observation well demonstrated by the comment of one Brisbane resident who stated that, despite living on the river, because his/her suburb was not specifically mentioned as one that would flood that "I assumed I was fine". Just as residents in the four case study locations had high expectations of official assistance during flood events, research following the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009 found that up to a quarter of residents expected emergency services to personally notify them of the need to evacuate before they would leave their homes [48].…”

Section: Residents' Roles and Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flood Risk in Australia: Whose Responsibility Is It, Anyway?

Box

Thomalla

Honert

2013

Water

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This paper presents research into four key stakeholders in flood risk management in Australia: local councils, the insurance industry, the State Emergency Service (SES), and local residents; examining the perception of their own roles and responsibilities, and those of the other stakeholders. Key informant interviews were conducted in four locations-Brisbane and Emerald, in Queensland, Dora Creek, in New South Wales, and Benalla, in Victoria. We find that understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder varied considerably between research participants. Insurance representatives felt their concerns about increasing flood risk costs were unheeded until the 2010-2011 floods made them the "canary in the coal mine". Councils felt they had limited options for reducing flood risk. SES representatives felt they were too relied upon for event response, with requests for assistance outstripping their capacity to assist, and many residents were uncertain how to prepare for flood, relying on emergency agencies and the local council to protect them. Key lessons for flood risk management in Australia are (a) an urgent need for all stakeholders to better understand each others' roles and responsibilities; and (b) residents must take greater responsibility for their own personal protection. Only then can the vision of shared responsibility presented by the 2009 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience be achieved.

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Section: Residents' Roles and Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flood Risk in Australia: Whose Responsibility Is It, Anyway?

Box

Thomalla

Honert

2013

Water

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“…This decision process is affected by multiple factors, such as the characteristics of a household [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52], conditions in which they reside (e.g., income, type of house, vehicle ownership, time of day) [49,50,53,54], warning time [55,56], perceived information [57][58][59][60][61][62] and personal risk perception [63][64][65][66][67][68].…”

Section: Hurricane Evacuation Response Ratementioning

confidence: 99%

Optimization of Evacuation Warnings Prior to a Hurricane Disaster

et al. 2017

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Abstract:The key purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that optimization of evacuation warnings by time period and impacted zone is crucial for efficient evacuation of an area impacted by a hurricane. We assume that people behave in a manner consistent with the warnings they receive. By optimizing the issuance of hurricane evacuation warnings, one can control the number of evacuees at different time intervals to avoid congestion in the process of evacuation. The warning optimization model is applied to a case study of Hurricane Sandy using the study region of Brooklyn. We first develop a model for shelter assignment and then use this outcome to model hurricane evacuation warning optimization, which prescribes an evacuation plan that maximizes the number of evacuees. A significant technical contribution is the development of an iterative greedy heuristic procedure for the nonlinear formulation, which is shown to be optimal for the case of a single evacuation zone with a single evacuee type case, while it does not guarantee optimality for multiple zones under unusual circumstances. A significant applied contribution is the demonstration of an interface of the evacuation warning method with a public transportation scheme to facilitate evacuation of a car-less population. This heuristic we employ can be readily adapted to the case where response rate is a function of evacuation number in prior periods and other variable factors. This element is also explored in the context of our experiment.

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“…For the authors, warnings are "not the product of a preestablished system but contributes to continuously define the system in a real-life context"; each warning uses, tests, reinforces and reconfigures the system of which it is a part. The notion of process has already been considered in several works on flood warnings (Drabek, 1999;Mileti, 1995), but only with regard to the reception of/reaction to warnings by the population (warning responses). Mucchielli's (1998) proposal, combined with AFNOR's definition, allows us to go beyond the question of response in order to define warning as the socio-technical process by which the reality of a given situation is taken into consideration in order to establish its meaning, so as to constitute and coordinate action in a context of assumed danger (Créton-Cazanave, 2010b).…”

Section: Defining the Warning Process And Practice-based Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stakeholders' issues for action during the warning process and the interpretation of forecasts' uncertainties

Créton-Cazanave

Lutoff

2013

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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This article considers the socio-geographical approach carried out as part of the MedUp program. It presents a study of the ways that the French "actors" manage forecast uncertainties during a flash flood warning process. In order to better understand the role of forecasts' uncertainties in decision making, we focused on the actions people took and how what they say explains their actions. The practices of actors involved in warnings for the Vidourle watershed (Gard, France), in particular, are analyzed using a practice-based approach. A set of categories of the "actors" was developed based on their descriptions of the problems they faced during the flash flood warning, independent of their socio-professional status and position in the warning chain. Five actor profiles result from this: Translators, Managers, Committed, Navigators and Vulnerable. For each profile, specific action contexts are defined, determining how each deals with uncertainty

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Understanding disaster warning responses

Cited by 167 publications

References 9 publications

Flood Risk in Australia: Whose Responsibility Is It, Anyway?

Flood Risk in Australia: Whose Responsibility Is It, Anyway?

Optimization of Evacuation Warnings Prior to a Hurricane Disaster

Stakeholders' issues for action during the warning process and the interpretation of forecasts' uncertainties

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