Can visits to certain businesses help predict evacuation decisions in real time?
Natural Hazards2025
This study aims to help understand and predict evacuation behavior by examining the relationship between evacuation decisions and visits to certain businesses using smartphone location and point of interest (POI) data collected across three hurricanes—Dorian (2019), Ida (2021), and Ian (2022)—for residents in voluntary and mandatory evacuation zones. Results from these data suggest residents visit POIs as part of preparatory activities before a hurricane impacts land. Statistical tests suggest that POI visits can be used as precursor signals for predicting evacuations in real time. Specifically, people are more likely to evacuate if they visit a gas station and are more likely to stay if they visit a grocery store, hardware store, pet store, or a pharmacy prior to landfall. Additionally, they are even less likely to leave if they visit multiple places of interest. These results provide a foundation for using smartphone location data in real time to improve predictions of behavior as a hurricane approaches.
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Trust, Traffic, and Contemporary Evacuation Barriers in Hurricane Ida
Journal of Disaster Studies2024
In hurricane evacuation decision-making research, it is critical to understand complex influences and larger processes at work in shaping the decisions and experiences of people and communities in affected areas and evacuation zones. Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana in 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing economic problems, and disruptions to trust in political officials. Gulf Coast residents made decisions about if and when to evacuate in this context. We use a framework that emphasizes the social causes of evacuation decision making, including optimism bias, compounding disasters, and situational factors. Results show that during Ida residents were navigating the relative risks, varied perceptions, and previous experiences with other disasters, compounding disasters, traffic, work and school demands, and long-term systemic problems.
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Evacuating Pets and People: Time, Decisions, and Resources
Practicing Anthropology2023
Increasingly, research focuses on challenges associated with people threatened by disasters but who refuse evacuation without their pets. Less attention is paid to decision making processes and costs of evacuating or sheltering-in-place with pets. Pet owners consider whether or not to evacuate, but—importantly—they also consider the financial costs of staying at pet-friendly shelters, securing necessary supplies for safe pet evacuation, and the impact of pet preparation on evacuation timing (temporal costs). Decision making is compounded by the risks they face, the preparations necessary, and their perceived impact on their animals. Those without pets in their household can be impacted by those with pets, as people often make evacuation decisions in groups.
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Imagining an ethnographic otherwise during a pandemic
Human Organization2022
By understanding pandemics and compounding disasters as disruptive sociopolitical processes rooted in histories and geographies of systemic inequality, we reflect on both novel and familiar manifestations of research practice, ethical decision making, and responsibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. We advocate for the importance of flexible, care-driven research methods that forefront local expertise and collaborations and relational ethics that are, oftentimes, at odds with neoliberal and institutional temporalities. Lastly, we reflect on how our own positionalities and experiences shape how we have navigated, reconceptualized, and challenged our own research practices in the context of a global pandemic.
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Community resilience: toward a framework for an integrated, interdisciplinary model of disaster
Natural Hazards Review2021
The science of resilience presents the opportunity to explain how natural, social, and physical systems interact to impact community functioning and well-being postdisaster. This paper describes the development and theoretical foundation of a comprehensive conceptual model, presenting a shift from the usual thinking about resilience to construe resilience more precisely as the trajectory of postdisaster recovery, with community functioning and well-being as the outcome of interest. Unique contributions of the results include the identification of the natural, social, and physical systems that are implicated in disasters, and the dynamic nature and directionality of how these elements relate in the context of hazards.
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Hurricane evacuation beliefs and behaviour of inland vs. coastal populations
Environmental Hazards2021
Although hurricanes can cause severe hazard effects well inland, little is known about the evacuation behaviour of inland populations compared to coastal populations. Using survey data collected in the United States after Hurricanes Florence (2018), Michael (2018), Barry (2019), and Dorian (2019), we investigate differences between coastal and inland populations in evacuation decisions and timing, and their causes. The data indicate that coastal populations evacuated at a higher rate than their inland counterparts (those not in coastal counties) in every hurricane studied. Chi-square tests identified differences in characteristics of coastal and inland populations, and a multiple logistic regression identified variables associated with evacuation.
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Is This Still Triage? Or Are We Back to Teaching?
Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted teaching over the past year, pushing many instructors and students into remote learning. These changes have forced new discussions about serious issues with the digital divide and an array of intersectional inequities, and they have prompted conversations about the physical and mental health of everyone involved. While initial transitions to remote learning were treated as distinct from previous in-person or online learning, increasingly we are seeing a push to “return to normal.” This essay argues that pandemic recoveries take many forms, and risk and uncertainty must continue to shape our teaching. We must continue to engage with critical issues related to inequity, intersectionality, and broad discussions of health if we are to ensure a safe return.
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COVID-19: What Do Recoveries Look Like?
Practicing Anthropology2021
COVID-19 recoveries will not only be rooted in the pandemic itself but also questions of access, rights, and resources that long pre-dated the emergence of the virus or people’s responses to it. While such recoveries have not yet begun, signs are already emerging that indicate the risks of a “return to normal” that leaves many without equal, affordable, and often wanted and needed access to virtual or real-world spaces and resources. Examining and questioning these issues now, during short-term recovery efforts, and in the years and decades of long-term recovery to come are essential to working towards a more just system of COVID-19 recoveries.
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